Police personnel from two Assam districts conducted nightlong search operations to apprehend 186 railway passengers who were among the hundreds who skipped the mandatory Covid-19 test upon their arrival from Kerala at the Jagiroad Railway Station on Sunday.

Hordes of passengers, mostly migrant workers, were seen running out of the station soon after alighting from the Kanyakumari-Dibrugarh Vivek Express ostensibly to escape the Covid test, sending the administration into a tizzy because of soaring Covid cases and deaths and prompting a massive operation to trace, test and book the offenders.

Morigan district police chief Aparna Natarajan

and her counterpart in adjoining Nagaon district Anand Mishra told The Telegraph that they have arrested 130 and 46 passengers respectively in search operations that started around 7pm on Sunday and continued till the wee hours of the Monday. The search is still on for those who may have managed to give the slip till now.

There are 51,764 active cases in Assam of which 3,563 were detected on Sunday, which also saw 72 deaths. Since 2020 April, altogether 3,69,183 persons have tested positive while 2,739 of them have passed away.

“We have apprehended 130 passengers and another 10 passengers were handed over to us by Nagaon police after nightlong operations with help of local people and village elders. They have all been booked under relevant sections of the IPC and the Disaster Management Act and will be produced in court on Tuesday,” Natarajan said.

She added: “Eleven passengers have tested positive in RAT. We are now waiting for the RT-PCR reports. We will also test their family members. Barring those testing positive, others have been arrested.”

Officially 133 people were to de-board at Jagiroad but going by videos the number of passengers exiting the station must be over 400.

“We cannot put a number.… There were adequate facilities at the station but the number was much more and unmanageable,” she said.

The swiftness to trace the passengers could be attributed to the government’s efforts to check the spread of the virus from the urban to rural areas. This was also one of chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma’s directives to deputy commissioners after a review of the Covid scenario on Sunday.

On Monday, Sarma apprised the Assembly that Assam was not only fighting Covid but also helping the entire northeast fight the virus.

“Our doctors and healthcare workers’ brave efforts have made us a self-sufficient state. Assam’s fight against #COVID19 is unparalleled and cannot be compared with any other state. We have supplied medicines including remdesivir to other states like Jharkhand and Telangana,” he said.