E-Paper
First special train ferrying UP migrants reaches Lucknow from Maharashtra’s Nashik
The 847 migrant workers travelled in the Indian Railway’s Shramik Special train, which started from Nashik on Saturday morning and reached the state capital via Jhansi and Kanpur.
More than 800 migrant workers from Uttar Pradesh arrived in Lucknow in a special train from Maharashtra’s Nashik on Sunday morning amid ongoing Covid-19 lockdown.
The 847 migrant workers travelled in the Indian Railway’s Shramik Special train, which started from Nashik on Saturday morning and reached the state capital via Jhansi and Kanpur.
This is the first special train to arrive in Uttar Pradesh with migrant labourers, who were stranded in Maharashtra and other parts of the country after Prime Minister Narendra announced the lockdown on March 24.
Health workers registered the details of the migrant workers as they deboarded the train at the Charbagh station and segregated them according to the districts they belong before taking their temperature.
Special buses of state transport department will ferry the passengers to their respective districts. The migrant workers were screened by health experts before they boarded the buses. Anyone with symptoms of infection will be taken to quarantine centres or hospitals.
Authorities had kept ambulance on standby outside the Lucknow railway station to take passengers with Covid-19 symptoms to these quarantine centres and hospitals.
Those who were allowed to make a forward journey were also handed food packets.
The railways had said it will run Shramik Special trains to move migrant workers, pilgrims, tourists, students and other persons stranded at different places due to the nationwide lockdown that came into force from March 25.
Ten such Shramik Special trains were run on Saturday to ferry stranded migrants to Jharkhand, UP, Bihar from Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Gujarat and the five southern states—Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Karnataka, Kerala and Andhra Pradesh.
The trains scheduled from the respective railway zones were to ferry nearly 20,000 passengers, senior officials said.
The Centre on Friday decided to allow these special trains to enable stranded migrants to return home amid demands by states and a recognition of the logistical challenges involved in transporting millions of people back to their homes.
Five such trains operated on Friday.
On Saturday, around 7,500 migrants who were stranded in Rajasthan and Uttarakhand arrived in Lucknow. A senior official said the two states transported the migrants to the borders of UP from where around 285 buses were deployed to take the migrants to their respective home districts.
