The Greater Chennai Corporation has issued fresh directives to the residents on Wednesday in which the city's governing body has mandated the residents to wear the face-masks while stepping out of their houses for essential purposes. According to the directives, the people who have found violating the order would be treated as committing an offense and ought to pay penalty for breaching the directive.

The corporation has said that the pedestrians who are not wearing masks would have to pay Rs 100 as fine while riding the vehicles without masks would invite more penalties. People who hit the roads on their vehicles without wearing masks would return home without their vehicles as it would be seized by the authorities and adding to that, their driving license would be placed under suspension for six months.

According to the reports, the new order has been passed under section two of the Epidemic Diseases Act, 1987 and comes into immediate effect with the view of containing the spread of Coronavirus in the city. The corporation has also rolled out the guidelines that need to be followed while disposing of N95 and three-ply masks, gloves, and other solid waste. 

As per the guidelines, the people in the quarantine houses must disinfect the used masks and gloves using 5% of ordinary bleach solution or 1% of sodium hypochlorite solution and they have to store the used masks in the yellow bags distributed to them by the corporation. 

The yellow bags with the masks would be collected and dispatched to the Bio-Medical Waste Processing Facility Centres of the corporation and incinerator. For the people who are at the non-quarantine houses, they must follow the same procedure and store it in a separate cover following which they must hand over the covers to the sanitary workers.

Earlier, Chennai Corporation Commissioner G Prakash said that "the residents can also wear masks made up of cloths. They can make the masks with a two-layered cotton cloth and apart from that, they also can use the handkerchief to cover up their face". The face mask has been one of the recommended preventive measures on the fray to combat the spread of the global pandemic. As of Tuesday evening, the state has reported 1,204 positive cases of which 1,111 are active patients while 81 people have been recovered and discharged and twelve have succumbed to the virus. Most of the positive cases include both Indian and foreign nationals.