Bajaj Auto’s Aurangabad Factory Shut After 79 Employees Test Positive For COVID-19

Leading automobile maker Bajaj Auto has shut down its largest manufacturing plant at Aurangabad after 79 employees tested positive for COVID-19, Times Now reported.

The Aurangabad plant in Maharashtra, which handles a bulk of the exports of motorcycles and three-wheelers, had resumed its operations with limited workforce from April 22. The company had said that it was taking all precautions to avoid the spread of coronavirus among employees.

Operations at the manufacturing plant will remain suspended for at least two days, i.e. to allow the company to thoroughly sanitise the premises. There is no clarity yet if normal operations will resume from Monday.

On Thursday(Jun 26) , Bajaj Auto had announced that it has regained 80% of its last June’s demand with a majority of its factory workers resuming work at its production facilities. Besides Auranagabad, the company has manufacturing units at Chakan near Pune and Pantnagar in Uttarakhand.

Rajiv Bajaj, the managing director of the company, has been a trenchant critic of lockdown as a method to control the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. He had advocated homeopathy and herd immunity as the way forward to combat the novel coronavirus pandemic.

Bajaj had said that homeopathy has been documented to be quite effective in pandemics similar to coronavirus. He claimed that both in 1918 Spanish Flu or the recent Cuban epidemic, the doctors who treated their patients with homeopathy lost a fraction of patients as compared to those who were treated with allopathic medicine.

In a video conversation with Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, Bajaj (whose family enjoys close proximity with the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty) termed the lockdown "draconian" and claimed that such steps were not even enforced during the World War.

"The way India has been locked down is draconian. We tried to implement a hard lockdown which was porous. So I think we have ended up with the worst of both worlds," Bajaj scion (who incidentally was named after late PM Rajiv Gandhi) told the Congress leader.

Bajaj also mocked the lockdown saying that while it was aimed at flattening the Covid curve it instead ended up flattening a very different curve — the growth (GDP) curve.

During the discussion with the Wayanad MP, Bajaj opined that India tried to emulate Europe and the US rather than Japan and South Korea,.