DN&V Correspondent
New Delhi, May 2: With Lockdown being extended for two more weeks the Indian Railways began operating non-stop, special trains, named the ‘Shramik Special’, to ferry migrant workers, students and tourists back to their home states following a go-ahead from the union home ministry. The first train, ferrying a little more than 1,000 people, left Hyderabad’s Lingampally railway station for Hatia in Jharkhand in the wee hours of Friday.
The initial statement issued by the railways said: “a one-off special train was run from Lingampalli to Hatia on request of the State Government of Telangana and as per the directions of Ministry of Railways.” The railways later operated five more trains — Aluva to Bhubaneswar, Nasik to Lucknow, Nasik to Bhopal, Jaipur to Patna, and Kota to Hatia — on the day.
Railway ministry officials said a few more trains will be run from point-to-point in the next couple of days. “As MHA guidelines prescribe, we will run special trains only when we are approached by state governments. Several states are discussing with our zonal offices. We are ready to run more trains complying with the norms,” a railway ministry official said.
Railway officials said the trains had 24 coaches, with 54 passengers allowed in a sleeper coach. “This is being done to maintain social distancing during the journey,” the official said. The respective state governments will coordinate and pay the ticket price of a sleeper class and another Rs 50 per passenger, reports TOI.
The union home ministry’s guidelines issued earlier this week had only specified transportation by road, in buses provided by state governments, for repatriation of migrant workers. But several state chief ministers, including Nitish Kumar of Bihar, Maharashtra’s Uddhav Thackeray and Punjab’s Amarinder Singh, had called for operating trains. But Punya Salila Srivastava, joint secretary in the union ministry of home affairs, said Thursday the orders issued at present were for “using buses”.
A new risk for states — untested returnees: With 142 new cases of Covid-19 detected among the returning pilgrims in Punjab on Thursday, states may be gearing up for a fresh explosion in their coronavirus headcount, as several other states attempt to bring back home migrants stranded since the lockdown. Punjab’s problem with returning pilgrims may be relatively small — there were 3,498 pilgrims stuck since Lockdown 1.0 in Maharashtra’s Nanded, of which 2,293 have returned — but other states have a far bigger problem. Bihar has 27 lakh migrant workers in Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra, while UP has about 15 lakh migrant workers stuck in other states. Rajasthan has already received requests from 6 lakh migrant workers stranded outside the state to return home.
The spike in Punjab’s new cases — it recorded 34 new cases on Wednesday — indicates that states could be looking at untested positive carriers of Covid-19 spiking up the numbers after weeks of trying to control the spread of the pandemic. Both UP and Rajasthan have managed to slow down their doubling rate to higher than the national average of 11 days — with UP at 12 days and Rajasthan at 17.8 days. It also highlights the oft-repeated criticism that the number of people being tested wasn’t enough, in proportion to the country’s population — even though the testing rate has risen to almost 694 per million from 19 per million just after the start of Lockdown 1.0.
However, it’s not just the return of inter-state migrants that is worrying — over 3.5 lakh non-resident Keralites have registered with the Non-resident Keralites Affairs (NORKA) department seeking a return to India, with the largest chunk, of 153,660, being from the UAE. These numbers could rise several times considering that there are 80 lakh Indians living in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. There are 94,483 Malayalis residing in different parts of India who have also registered with NORKA in order to return home. In addition, there are 2,100 Indians stranded in the US who want to return to India but can only do so once the lockdown is lifted.
