The 11-day Ganesh Chaturthi, the largest public festival in Maharashtra, will be held this year from August 22, but the pandemic and the restrictions that come with it are creating a rift in the rural areas of the State.

Lakhs of city residents, especially those having roots in the Konkan region of Maharashtra, are expected to go back to their ancestral villages for celebrating the festival. It is a tradition going back many generations.

However, this year, due to Covid-19, the local villagers want their relatives to remain in 14-day quarantine before entering the village, or avoid coming to the village altogether for the festival.

Vivek Bhide, a doctor and the chief trustee of the Ganesh temple at Ganpatipule in Ratnagiri district, said the villagers and the Gram Panchayat members want people coming from cities to reach the latest by August 3 so that they could be quarantined in local schools and other facilities. It will give them enough time for isolation and then re-engagement with the society and participating in the festival. Those individuals reaching after August 3 might not be allowed to enter the villages, he said.

Shekhar Samant, a social activist and a member of the Sindhudurg district Covid committee, said the locals do not have a problem if people from Mumbai and Pune follow quarantine rules strictly, but it has been observed in the past that they don’t. Even after the first lockdown, people from outside came to Sindhudurg and some ended being in fights and behaved unruly with the locals. The local people who got infected were those who came in contact with outsiders, he said.

Samant said the villagers are not wrong in asking outsiders to undergo quarantine. The locals fear for their lives and do not want any large outbreak of Covid-19 in the district. For the last four months, all the local businesses and economic activities are shut in the district. After such sacrifices, the number of Covid patients has been controlled at 288 with only five deaths. It was only possible due to village-level committees under the Gram Panchayats taking an active role in controlling the pandemic. If the people from outside come to the district and do not follow the quarantine rules, controlling the pandemic would be impossible as the local hospitals do not have enough beds and ventilators, he said.

A senior NCP leader said that as the Shiv Sena has a large voter base in cities such as Mumbai and Pune, it cannot ask them to give a miss to the festival this year. The festival is just one month away, but still, no clear dates and rules have been formulated for the quarantine, he said.

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