With railways to run special trains for migrants without consent from destination states
The Indian Railways on Tuesday announced that it will be running 200 special passenger trains daily from 1 June. This is in addition to the Shramik Special and the air-conditioned special trains which are currently being operated on the Rajdhani routes connecting 15 major cities to Delhi. On 29 April, the Centre had allowed migrant labourers to return to their home states and issued strict guidelines in terms of social distancing and quarantine rules. The Indian Railways operated the first train ferrying migrants back to their native states on 1 May.
Since then, multiple COVID-19 positive cases have emerged in the states like Bihar, Odisha, Assam, who have recorded a spike in patients with migrants testing positive on reaching their native states.Bihar, on Tuesday, reported 1,423 confirmed COVID-19 cases, of which 652 are migrant labourers who have returned home from outside the state. Out of the 652 who tested positive, 218 have come from Delhi, followed by 141 from Maharashtra, 139 from Gujarat, 36 from Haryana, and 33 from West Bengal.
Odisha recorded 102 new COVID-19 on Tuesday, raising the total cases to 978 in the state, a health department official told PTI. Of the new patients, 97 were in various quarantine centres across districts of Odisha as they had recently returned from Gujarat, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Telengana, Andhra Pradesh and Maharastra, the official said.
Assam on Tuesday witnessed the highest single-day spike in COVID-19 cases with 39 people, including a two-month-old baby, testing positive for the disease on Tuesday. Of these 39 new cases, 20 people had recently returned to the state and were in quarantine centres across districts, reports PTI.
Earlier, host states had faced the challenges of providing food and shelter for migrant labourers, and of convincing them of the necessity of staying where they were. Now, there is a new fear: of the coronavirus spreading in rural areas that have remained relatively untouched, which may lead to overwhelming the health infrastructure in the home states with the large influx of migrants.
