Indian Museum, Victoria Memorial Hall, Science City, and Birla Industrial and Technological Museum will reopen on November 10.

The culture ministry has decided to reopen museums and art galleries in view of the festive season and has issued a detailed standard operating procedure.

Victoria Memorial will restrict the number of visitors to 200 at a time. The garden can accommodate 500 visitors at a time, Jayanta Sengupta, the curator, said. “Once we sell 200 tickets for the museum and 500 tickets for the garden, we will stop selling tickets. Once those visitors start leaving, we will resume ticket sales but at no point will we have more than 200 visitors on the premises of the museum.”

The museums will have foot-pedal sanitiser machines and provision for thermal screening. Buying tickets online will be encouraged though provisions to buy tickets at the counters will be there.

“We will introduce online ticketing for the first time in Indian Museum,” A.D. Choudhury, the museum director, said.

Manual ticketing will be there with UV boxes to sanitise currency and tickets. There will be floor markers to ensure distancing rules are followed. Not more than 25 people will be allowed in galleries at a time, according to government guidelines.

Indian Museum File picture

As part of the SOP, the government has advised advanced booking of time slots and recording the contact details of all visitors to help in contact tracing in case of positive cases in museums and galleries. Safety officers will report unsafe conditions on premises.

Members of the CISF staff who screen baggage will be in PPEs and there will be isolation rooms, too.

Science City, which used to be remain open from 9am to 8pm before the pandemic will now remain open from 10am to 6pm, Science City director Subhag Chowdhury said. “Between 10am and 2pm, we will allow 500 visitors and between 2pm and 6pm another 500.”

Apart from online booking of tickets, there will be ticket vending machines at Science City with sanitiser machines nearby. Several interactive displays will have foot switches. Toilets, too, will have foot switches; there will be provisions for gloves as well.

Winter is the busiest season at museums, but Sengupta expects a low crowd count because of the pan-demic. “Everyone is at home now. Once local trains start running, we will see how it goes and take decisions accordingly.”