Train to chug from Kerala to Odisha transporting stranded migrant workers

ERNAKULAM: After days of uncertainty following the lockdown, nearly 1,200 migrant workers from Odisha, stranded in Kerala will undertake a journey to return home.

A nonstop train ferrying the migrants to Bhubaneshwar in Odisha will leave from Kerala's Aluva at 6pm on Friday.

This follows the home ministry's go-ahead to the railway ministry to run special trains for stranded migrant labourers and tourists to return home.

The first such train carrying migrant workers and labourers from Lingampally in Telangana to Hatia in Jharkhand started at 5 am today, days after the home ministry issued fresh guidelines on inter-state movement of stranded migrants.

Union home secretary Ajay Bhalla wrote to states on Friday, saying that railways will designate nodal officers and coordinate with states for "sale of tickets, social distancing and other safety measures to be observed at train stations and within trains."

"They will taken to the station in 30 KSRTC (Kerala State Road Transport Corporation, the state's public transport company) buses. The returnees were identified using bilingual aid workers amongst themselves," said VS Sunil Kumar, Kerala's minister for agriculture, who is coordinating the arrangements with various departments for the journey.

Enough food packets with long shelf life have been loaded for the long journey, Kumar added.

If this is successful, the government plans to run five more trains to other states, from Kerala's major stations like Thiruvananthapuram and Kozhikode, said Vishwas Mehta, secretary at the state home department.

Kerala has an estimated 3.6 lakh migrant workers, spread across 20,826 camps, who are being looked after by the state government.