Residents skirt social distancing norms and crowd near a store in Pimpri on Monday

PUNE: After two hours of mad rush on Monday morning, most of the grocery shop owners pulled down shutters of their establishments at noon in the absence of clear guidelines on the timing of operations.

Crowded roads in neighbourhoods till 11.45am wore a deserted look after noon, in just 15 minutes. Several residents had returned home empty-handed by then amid the scramble for ration.

Several residents and experts fear the social distancing norms would go for a toss because of the four-hour window of 10am to 2pm for grocery shops to function after the entire city was sealed. They stressed the limited time within would trigger rush at shops every day, defeating the purpose of the curfew — “social distancing”.

Town planner Aneeta Gokhale Benninger said, “The purpose of the curfew is to reduce person-to-person contact. If only four hours are given for shopping, people will crowd stores even if they do not want to. The trick is to spread it over a longer period and check the genuineness of the reason.”

Before the curfew was imposed, the grocery shops in areas under Zone 1 would operate from 10am to noon. Those in areas like Kharadi and Chandanagar had an operation timing of noon to 2pm. The grocery shops in Zone 3, such as Kothrud, Warje, Karvenagar and Uttamnagar, operated from morning till noon. Shops in some other areas would operate from morning till noon, and then reopen in the evening for a few hours.

A citizen tweeted, “Grocery shops in Vimannagar are open from 11am to 2pm; places are crowded, need to stand in a long queue. If the shops are allowed to be open from 9am-6pm, there would be no such rush.”

Sachin Nivangune, the president of Pune District Retail Traders’ Association, said, “People tend to flock the stores for the smallest of items, which they sometimes do not even need. This has been causing crowding at shops, creating problems for the retailers. It is one of the reasons for keeping shutters down for four days.”

Malati Patil of Model Colony said, “Many grocery store owners themselves do not know the closing and opening time.”

