The Supreme Court has come down heavily on those state governments which have not yet given any compensation to the families of the victims of the corona pandemic. The Supreme Court had ordered that the family of each of the deceased would be compensated with Rs 50,000. All the states started acting upon it but there were two main problems in it.

One is that the death toll was low but the demand for compensation was high. The second problem is that the compensation applications were very few in comparison to the number of deaths declared by the governments. For example, in Haryana, the official figure of the dead was 10,077, but only 3003 applications were received and in Punjab, for 16,557 applications, only 8786 applications were received whereas in few states, the exact opposite happened. Like the death toll in Maharashtra was 1,41,737 but 2,13,000 applications came. This happened in most states. In such a situation, even half of the people have been paid the compensation. The court has expressed its deep anger.

It strongly reprimanded the chief secretaries of Bihar and Andhra Pradesh and told them that if they do not fulfill their responsibility soon, the court will be forced to take the next strict step. The judges also said that the authenticity of the figures released by your government on the victims of the epidemic is doubtful.

In a province like Bihar, how can the death toll be only 12 thousand? The court has asked the Gujarat government on what basis it has rejected 4,000 applications. The court has said that if any application should be rejected, then the reason should be told and the sender of the application should be explained how to remove that deficiency.

The highest concern of the court is of those children, whose mother and father have both become victims of the pandemic. The court has also raised the question of the arrangement of living, education and maintenance of such orphan children. It has also asked the governments to make special efforts to make the poor and uneducated families living in villages and cities aware of the matter of compensation.

Suppose the court did not mention some of the applications which may be bogus, even then what? Hardly anyone would like to take compensation in the name of such non-corona deaths and even if they want, they will be very poor. Even in such a situation, if the state shows generosity, nothing wrong in that.