India has asked its armed forces and central paramilitary forces to help set up additional quarantine centres that could be used as temporary hospitals with isolation facilities as preparations to combat a possible large-scale outbreak of the novel coronavirus, home ministry officials said on Wednesday.

India’s count of coronavirus patients increased by 10 on Wednesday with eight new cases in Kerala, and one each in Delhi and Rajasthan. Although all 60 patients who have tested positive until now have a travel history or were contacts of persons with a travel history, health authorities have emphasised the need to bolster the country’s preparedness to manage clusters of cases.

While the health ministry has asked states and Union Territories to prepare quarantine and isolation facilities in public hospitals and called on the private sector to maintain a pool of beds, officials said the country may require more facilities if large clusters emerge.

A home ministry official said the Border Security Force (BSF) had been asked to maintain a pool of 2,000 beds distributed across its centres in Calcutta, Agartala, Jodhpur, Hazaribagh, Indore, Jalandhar and Srinagar, among other places.

The Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) has been asked to prepare a pool of 1,800 beds in Calcutta, Ahmedabad, Allahabad, Bangalore, Coimbatore, Hyderabad, Imphal, Jammu, Nagpur and Ranchi, the official said.

The Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) has already set up a 600-bed facility in Delhi and is preparing one in Greater Noida.

External affairs minister S. Jaishankar told the Rajya Sabha on Wednesday that India had begun evacuating Indians from the most affected parts of Iran. He said there were around 6,000 Indian nationals in Iran, which include around 1,100 pilgrims mainly from Ladakh, Jammu and Kashmir and Maharashtra, and around 300 students and 1,000 fishermen from Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Gujarat.

“The first priority are visiting pilgrims,” Jaishankar said in a statement. “Many of them are in Qom, where the coronavirus incidence has been strong. Age is also a factor that was taken into account…. Our understanding is that the region where most fishermen are located has not been affected so severely. These factors will guide our approach in the coming days.”

Given the scale of the outbreak and the pressure on Iran’s own resources, Jaishankar said, six Indian health officials have been deputed to Iran to set up testing and sampling facilities there.

The first batch of 58 evacuees from Iran arrived in India on March 10.

India has thus far evacuated 948 people from coronavirus-affected countries, including several hundreds from Wuhan and Hubei in China, and 124 people, including five foreign nationals, from the coronavirus-affected Japanese cruise ship Diamond Princess.