Dispur has asked homebound train passengers to be 'ready' for a difficult time at the quarantine centres.
Altogether 842 stranded people will return to Assam on Wednesday in the first New Delhi-Dibrugarh special train that left the national capital on Tuesday.
The passengers, many of whom will get down at Dibrugarh, will be carried to their respective districts by bus and quarantined for 14 days in public institutions like schools, colleges and Anganwadi centres as hotels are not available at all places. If some of them develop Covid-19 symptoms, then their swab samples will be tested.
Many of these passengers are from Arunachal Pradesh and will be ferried and quarantined there by the government of their home state.
Assam health minister Himanta Biswa Sarma on Tuesday requested the homebound train passengers to be ready to live in some difficulty as these quarantine centres do not have proper toilet facilities. The public health engineering department has been asked to set up toilets and arrange drinking water facilities at these centres.
“This will be the reality of life for those coming to Assam. They will have to go through this,” Sarma said.
He also said that from now on home quarantine of a person would mean that his/her entire home would be considered a containment zone and other people would bring food for the family.
Sarma said in the next seven days around 12,000 people would enter the state by train, which will play a decisive role in the state’s fight against the pandemic.
“Till yesterday (Monday), we had thought only one train would run between Delhi and Dibrugarh. Last night, the railways said they would run trains for one week. The trains will come through other coronavirus-affected states like Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal and Bihar. People will board the trains in these states,” Sarma said.
Assam had earlier requested the Centre for trains from places like Chennai (Tamil Nadu), Bangalore (Karnataka), Ahmedabad (Gujarat) and Mumbai (Maharashtra) also but has not received any confirmation yet, Sarma said.
Besides trains, buses and private vehicles, there have been reports of migrants workers returning to Assam on bicycle and foot. Among them is a group of youths from Guwahati and Udalguri, who had started on bicycles from Jammu on May 6 and are on their way home.
So far, 3,255 people have entered Assam through Srirampur checkgate and 342 through Chagolia, both on West Bengal border, by road after the Centre announced relaxation on people’s movement on May 4. Besides, 3,705 people have entered from other northeastern states.
A group of 11 people coming to Guwahati from Manipur met with an accident in the morning when the bus they were travelling in hit a tree at Bokoliahat, 60km from Diphu, the headquarters of Karbi Anglong district. Police said the bus was carrying migrants to a quarantine centre in Guwahati. One person was seriously injured and admitted to a local hospital. The others were brought to Guwahati in another bus.
The Majuli district administration on Tuesday arranged to send 40 stranded people to Murshidabad in West Bengal in two buses after proper check-up. These people had come to Majuli for business one-and-a-half months ago and had got stranded because of the lockdown.
Meanwhile, the number of pending samples in the state’s laboratories is mounting every day. On Tuesday, 1,113 samples were pending in different laboratories.
Apart from this, Sarma said, the government will also have to test the samples of 7,782 people suffering from fever, one of the symptoms of Covid-19, in 10,000 of the state’s 26,000 villages.
The health department has engaged its workers to survey each village to detect people having Covid-like symptoms.
“The number of people with fever will go up once all the villages are surveyed,” Sarma said.
Additional reporting by Vinod Kumar Singh in Dhemaji and Sarat Sarma in Nagaon
