Delhiites Rush To Buy Essential Items, Queue Up Outside Shops

NEW DELHI: It took Ravi Kumar, a resident of Mayur Vihar Extension in east Delhi, two hours to buy groceries at a retail store in the neighbourhood on Wednesday. The long wait was not due to the crowd but due to the safety and social distancing measures being taken by store in-charges in view of the Covid-19 outbreak.

- Ashish Mishra, Shiv Sunny and Abhishek Dey

“T had to wait for around 30 minutes for my turn to enter the store to buy essential items. Itis because they were allowing only two to three persons to go inside at a time. The rest would have to wait outside the shop in a queue, maintaining a distance of about three feet. Many items such as tetra packs of milk, flour, vegetables were not available,’ Kumar, who went to Big Bazaar supermarket, said.

A similar situation prevailed at other grocery stores. Shop owners and the administration took different measures, from asking visitors to wear masks, to marking spots outside shops for customers to stand, to ensure social distancing.

“We are not allowing anyone inside whois not wearing a mask. We check their temperature and ask them to sanitise hands before entering,” Dileep Tewatiya, a manager at a 24Seven branch in Karol Bagh, said.

To ensure customers keep a safe distance from each other, police in Dwarka joined hands with RWA and market associations to make people stand inside circles marked outside shops.

“We identified grocery shops, medical stores and milk booths that could see crowding. We marked spots to ensure social distancing among customers,” said Anto Alphonse, deputy commissioner of police (Dwarka).

Not many customers were seen at most grocery shops and vegetable stalls in different parts of Delhi on Wednesday. Shopkeepers said this was because of panic buying on Tuesday evening itself, just after the announcement of a complete lockdown by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.