Blueprint for Facilitating Migrants’ Travel
The biggest weapon in fight against Coronavirus is social distancing. India is undergoing a 40-day Lockdown period which has helped in containing the spread of the virus. However, there are certain challenges which need to be tackled, most daunting one being facilitating travel of migrant workers.
Once the travel restrictions are lifted, it is expected that there will be excessive crowd on Roads, Railway Stations and Bus Stops in addition to the regular commuters of major cities. Similar trends have been observed in other countries. Hence, it’s prudent to facilitate travel of the migrants before the Travel Restrictions are lifted.
To avoid any potential spread of COVID-19, migrants should travel in phases using the Cluster based Approach. It will require close coordination between State administration and Railway Authorities. To begin with, local administration must earmark location/cluster of migrants from where maximum requests to travel are being received and gather details about number of passengers and destination stations. These details should be furnished to administration of destination states and Indian Railways. Based on number of people travelling to particular state, and stoppages permitted by the destination state, Indian Railways will plan the number of trains and route for that state. Example, different routes for North and South Bihar. It’s very important to do this exercise in utmost secrecy, so as to avoid large crowd gatherings which has the potential to defeat the whole purpose of social distancing and cluster approach. Another approach is to open a registration desk in each such locality where people will come to register will be stamped and will be sent to quarantine centre(school buildings etc), then after 14 days if they are found healthy after quarantine they will be sent, this way we can avoid spread of infection to passengers in the train, and hence less burden on destination states.
Local authorities should then ensure screening of passengers to ensure no infected persons travels. Further, In order to avoid any chaos, State administration must pick up migrants in designated buses as per train details given by Indian Railways. Police barricades should be there at designated pick up points and in case of crowding, administration can have change of plans as per emergency. Buses will be labelled based on destination stations and train route/station. They will be informed well in advance that these trains will run non-stop and they will be taken care of in the train itself.
Buses should be scheduled at different frequencies and venues so as to avoid crowding. The buses will drop people at designated Railway Stations, like Anand Vihar for Bihar migrants, Anand Vihar & Ghaziabad for U.P. migrants, etc. Each bus must deliberately run at a slow speed and take a detour to delay by 10-20 minutes behind previous bus for the designated station, so as to give more time to station authorities for arrangements as well as to avoid crowding, buses will communicate with each other to regulate their route and speed.
At Stations, there will be zig-zag barricades, with separators to control the flow of crowd in the queue. All passengers will be given a free ticket and assigned a seat number will then be grouped as per their train schedule. While in bus they will be given paper token marked as queue number which they have to join as per their destination station and hence train to board. Queue formation and waiting arrangements will be done accordingly. They will first pass through disinfection tunnel at station and screened and stamped in arm with date and place. They should also be provided food, water, and basic hygiene kit containing masks and sanitisers. All activities and faces will be recorded in camera.
Once appropriate number of passengers enter the platform, the separators will be used, to control the flow of people to the platform and to coordinate the boarding on trains. If 2 platforms are used then after first train is full for queue 1, we stop flow of people for 2 minutes and let the first train leave. Then allow the flow of people for queue 2 and guide them to other platform. Once train is full we again stop the flow of people by 2 minutes, and allow flow of queue 3, during this time another train would have arrived at 1st platform, and so on. Change of platform and simultaneous placement of trains on multiple platforms must be avoided. Trains must have big size paper poster with details of train stoppages. The queue were made accordingly and destination station will be announced once people for a train are at platform. Train should be frequently sanitised.
The trains will run non-stop. To avoid unnecessarily chain pulling, the chain handle must be coated with dry red ink (warning will be mentioned and announced), so as to immediately catch the culprit once he pulls the chain. The trains will stop only for water or crew change. At the destination stations, district administration will screen all passengers. If there is a suspicion that a particular infected person has travelled in a particular coach/train, then administration will stamp/mark them in different colours based on their threat perception of infection and transmission to passengers in same coach.
The migrants from say different coaches/trains should be isolated from the other group, so as to localise the infection spread. State can take measures with regards to quarantine, local transport and marking of house and inspection of migrants arrived. The empty trains coming back should be disinfected first. They can be used as “Cargo on Seat” Trains or for “SETU” bookings.
Basic details of migrant passengers such as Aadhar card, number of family members, skills and industry they have worked in past, etc. then this data can be used for later planning for setting up of small industry or creation of infrastructure which will be needed to kick start the economy and provide jobs to these migrants.
The numbers of such trains may be somewhere around 5-10 thousand based on number of migrants willing to travel. Migrants after being out of job shouldn’t be burdened with ticket fare. Hence ideally, Govt must compensate railways and run these trains for free to avoid undue burden on migrants or Railways.
There can be state specific changes in this strategy to ensure safe and smooth movement of migrants to their hometowns.
Regards,
