At least 30 passengers, including women and children who got off the New Delhi-Howrah special train at Burdwan station on Saturday, were stranded for at least six hours with no vehicle amid the state-wide lockdown to arrest the spike in Covid cases.
Sources said the AC special train from New Delhi arrived at Burdwan station around 9am on Saturday. Most passengers were migrant workers or from nearby Murshidabad and Hooghly districts.
Jahangir Mollah, a resident of Hooghly’s Dadpur who works as a mason in Sharjah, and his two co-workers were among the passengers. Mollah and the two others reached New Delhi from the UAE on an Air India flight on July 24.
Outside Burdwan station, Mollah urged railway authorities to stop train services on days of lockdown in a state. “Otherwise it is just harassment. We got off the train around 9am and did not get a vehicle till 3pm. We boarded a train with railway staff around 3pm and returned home.”
It was the same for five youths from Murshidabad who were returning from their workplace in Chandigarh.
“We did not know about the lockdown in Bengal today (Saturday). A car agreed to take us for Rs 7,000. So, I called up home and asked them to arrange a car, which came for Rs 4,000,” said Sarfarashuddin, a resident of Sagardighi.
He added that the lockdown took away jobs of people like him, and now they were having to spend “small fortunes” on cars back home.
Arindam Niyogi, the additional district magistrate (general), East Burdwan, said: “We had no information about the movement of trains.”
The state government had requested Eastern Railway to stop train services on the days Bengal was in lockdown.
“Based on the state government’s proposal, we decided to cancel trains on the days of lockdown in Bengal. Trains will not start from Delhi on the day before the lockdown,” said Ekalabya Chakraborty, senior PRO of Eastern Railway.
About the harassment of passengers, Chakraborty said the train had no stop at Burdwan.
“It might have stopped for technical reasons. We had arranged two local trains for passengers on two suburban routes for those who got off at Howrah station,” he said.
