300 TRAINS A DAY FOR MIGRANTS?
NEW DELHI: The Indian Railways is geared up to run 300 trains a day to ferry stranded migrant labourers to their hometowns, railways minister Piyush Goyal said on Sunday, while also appealing to states to ramp up efforts to ensure that the workers reach their destinations across the country in the next three-four days.
The railways ran till Sunday a total of 366 Shramik Special trains with over 360,000 migrant workers.
NEWDELHI: The Indian Railways is geared up to run 300 trains a day to ferry stranded migrant labourers to their hometowns, railways minister Piyush Goyal said on Sunday, while also appealing to states to ramp up efforts to ensure that the workers reach their destinations across the country in the next three-four days.
According to his ministry, the railways ran till Saturday a total of 364 Shramik Special trains. Of the 90 trains planned on Sunday, 64 had already left for their destinations till the filing of this report. Altogether, the railways has ferried 450,000 passengers.
While 287 trains have already reached their destinations, 79 were in transit. “As per the directions of Hon’ble PM Narendra Modi ji, Railways is fully geared up to run 300 Shramik Special trains every day at short notice since the last six days. I appeal to all the States to give permission to evacuate and bring back their stranded migrants so that we can get all of them back to their homes in the next 3-4 days itself,” Goyal said in a series of tweets.
Shramik Special trains, which began on May 1, are bound for a single destination without any stoppages. Usually, they have 24 coaches with each carrying a little over 50 passengers in place of the total capacity of 72, taking the total number of passengers per train to up to 1,200. This means 300 trains a day for the next four days would be able to carry over 1.4 million passengers.
The Shramik Special trains are being run only after a concurrence is given by states that are sending the passengers as well as those receiving them, the ministry said. In an earlier guideline, the Centre asked both sides to coordinate for the transit of migrant workers who are stuck due to the ongoing lockdown prompted by the coronavirus disease.
According to states’ estimates on April 30, around 10 million workers were stranded across the country; many of them struggling after losing their jobs in the wake of the lockdown. Experts, too, pointed out that the number of stranded migrants could be more than the central government’s estimates even though several of them have already reached their homes by special buses and these trains.
In the first week of April, a status report submitted by the Centre to the Supreme Court said a little over a million migrant workers and others were housed at 26,476 relief and active shelter camps across the country. Of them, 630,000 were in government camps and the rest in those run by non-government bodies.
“The estimates by the railway minister are based on the figure of roughly 600,000 migrants in government relief camps...However, it is estimated that there are roughly 60-65 million interstate migrant workers. Even if we assume that only 50% of them want to travel back, then the number of trains being suggested are not enough,” said Rajendran
Narayanan, assistant professor, Azim Premji University.
According to the railways ministry, a total of 287 trains have reached their destinations across 11 states — Andhra Pradesh (1 train), Bihar (87 trains), Himachal Pradesh (1 train), Jharkhand (16 trains), Madhya Pradesh (24 trains), Maharashtra (3 trains), Odisha (20 trains), Rajasthan (4 trains), Telangana (2 trains), Uttar Pradesh (127 trains), West Bengal (2 trains). These trains have departed from states such as Gujarat, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Haryana, Karnataka, Kerala, Punjab, Rajasthan and Telangana. Uttar Pradesh and Bihar have taken in the maximum number of migrants with more than 80,000 people each, according to ministry data.