Parts of Indian mega-slum cordoned off

MUMBAI: Indian police barricaded parts of one of Asia’s biggest slums on Friday after two coronavirus deaths, as under-pressure Prime Minister Narendra Modi sought to dispel "darkness and uncertainty" with a national light show.

India so far has largely escaped the pandemic with 2,300 infections and 56 deaths, according to official figures, but two fatalities and a third infection in the Dharavi neighbourhood of Mumbai have set alarm bells ringing.

Authorities have set up eight "containment zones" in the area, home to as many as a million people living and working in cramped tin-roofed shanties, flats and small factories. "We have home-quarantined people from these buildings and cordoned off the area so people can’t enter them, and enforced social distancing," said Vijay Khabale-Patil, spokesman of Mumbai’s city authority.

Police on Friday were not letting anyone in or out of the cordoned areas. The first death from coronavirus in Dharavi, on Wednesday, was a 56-year-old man with no travel history or contact with anyone known to be infected, although he previously had a renal complaint, officials said. The second fatality -- a 51-year-old sanitation worker living in a different area of Mumbai, but who worked in Dharavi -- died in hospital on Thursday.