Dissemination of right information to the people through media is most essential for any government at the time of crisis by any government.
Especially in the present scenario of dreaded Coronavirus spreading fast among the people, the governments should release official bulletins regularly to the media so that the people would know what is happening in the state.
If the governments withhold the information about the fresh cases of Coronavirus and the number of people being quarantined, it gives scope for spread of wrong information in the media and that leads to rumours and ultimately panic among the people.
In this regard, the Y S Jagan Mohan Reddy government is doing a much better job than the KCR government in Andhra Pradesh.
Initially, both Andhra and Telangana governments used to issue regular bulletins in the afternoon and in the evenings, even at 9 pm or even 10 pm.
But as the number of cases started shooting up, the Telangana medical and health department stopped releasing bulletins regularly. Only when there is a lot of pressure from the media, it releases the bulletin with half-baked information.
Even the chief minister KCR and health minister Etela Rajender have not given the correct figures. A couple of days ago, KCR said the number of cases went up by 10, while the actual figure was 14. Similarly, Rajender said the total number of quarantined people came to 13,000 but the actual figure was over 25,000.
However, the Jagan government has been consistently giving official bulletins that showed a periodical rise in the figures – number of positive cases, number of tests conducted and number of quarantined people. Even the measures being taken up by the governments are clearly mentioned in the bulletins.
For example, the AP health department promptly released the bulletin on Monday morning, stating that two new COVID-19 positive cases have been detected since last night making the total number of cases in the state to 23.
It also gave the details of the patients: a 49-year old male from Kakinada and a 72-year old male from Rajahmundry.
“The travel details of these two patients are being traced currently. A total of 33 samples have been tested since last night out of which 31 proved negative and 2 are positive,” it said.
So, why should Telangana hide details and confuse people?
