The Centre has informed the Supreme Court that it won’t be possible for it to grant monetary compensation to kin of Covid-19 victims. Stating that states cannot afford to pay Rs 4 lakh to the kin of every person who has succumbed to the virus, the Centre late on Saturday told the apex court that monetary compensations are only provided for natural disasters.
According to NDTV, the Union government also told the SC that if it pays compensation for Covid, then denying it for other diseases would be "unfair".
The government’s statement comes in the backdrop of the Supreme Court asking it to share its Covid compensation policy after a plea sought Rs 4 lakh for virus victims’ kin.
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According to reports, the Centre pointed out to the SC that applying provisions of the Disaster Management Law to Covid would not be appropriate due to the massive scale of the virus.
“Utilisation of scarce resources for giving ex-gratia, may have unfortunate consequences of affecting the pandemic response and health expenditure in other aspects and hence cause more damage than good," NDTV quoted the Centre as saying in its affidavit.
According to India Today, the Centre informed the apex court that “Insurance claims by those affected by Covid are being processed by the District Collectors and forwarded to the insurance company for release of funds to the claimants”.
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The Centre has reportedly also said that Rs 442.4 crore has been released to the insurance companies in this regard.
These developments come in the backdrop of the country logging 58,419 new Covid-19 infections and 1,576 fatalities on Saturday.
With the latest addition, India’s Covid caseload rose to 2.98 crore while the virus death toll surged to 3.86 lakh.
According to the Union health ministry data updated at 8 am today, the active Covid caseload in the country reduced to 7,29,243, comprising 2.44 per cent of the total infections.
