New Delhi: In what could be the biggest indication of the country slowly inching toward normalcy, the Indian Railways Sunday announced that it will gradually restart select passenger trains from 12 May.
Operations will initially start with 15 pairs of trains (30 return journeys), the government said in a statement. These will run as special trains from the New Delhi stations, connecting Dibrugarh, Agartala, Howrah, Patna, Bilaspur, Ranchi, Bhubaneswar, Secunderabad, Bengaluru, Chennai, Thiruvananthapuram, Madgaon, Mumbai Central, Ahmedabad and Jammu Tawi.
To start with, only Rajdhani Express trains with AC coaches will run. The trains will have limited stoppages and passengers will have to pay the fare for Rajdhani trains. “No concessional fares will be allowed,” said a railway ministry official.
Booking for reservations will start at 4 pm on 11 May and will only be available on the IRCTC website. Ticket booking counters at the railway stations shall remain closed.
“Only passengers with valid confirmed tickets will be allowed to enter the railway stations,” the ministry official told ThePrint.
More special services on new routes will be started subsequently, based on the number of available coaches. The government also said 20,000 coaches will be reserved for Covid-19 care centres and an adequate number of coaches will be booked to enable operations of up to 300 trains every day to transport migrant workers in the Shramik Special trains.
Mandatory passenger screening, face masks are must
A senior railway ministry official said train operations will be resumed under strict protocols, like screening of passengers at departure points and social distancing measures inside coaches.
“Only asymptomatic passengers will be allowed to board the trains. Besides, it will be mandatory for all passengers to wear face cover,” the official quoted above added.
Trains will become the first big public transport service to resume operations. Though the government had earlier allowed public buses, and autos to ferry single passengers, these activities were confined to the green zones (where no new cases have been reported in the last 28 days) only.
Currently, taxi aggregators like Ola and Uber are being allowed only for emergency and essential services.
Earlier this week, Union Civil Aviation Minister Hardeep Singh Puri had indicated that domestic flight operations will resume operations after assessing all safety parameters.
Longest suspension of railway services since 1974
The Indian Railways had to suspend all passenger services from 22 March after Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a nationwide lockdown on 24 March. Only goods trains have been plying since the lockdown was imposed, but with industries and manufacturing units shut, these too were running at 60 per cent of their capacity.
Senior railway officials told ThePrint that suspension of services had created a dent in the Railways’ finances, with losses running up to thousands of crores.
This has been the longest period for which railway services have been suspended after the 1974 rail strike, when train operations had remained suspended for 54 days.
Also read: Modi govt could allow more relaxations after 17 May, but lockdown unlikely to be lifted