New Delhi
India’s enormous railway network was grinding back to life Tuesday as a gradual lifting of the world’s biggest coronavirus lockdown gathered pace even as new cases surged.
The country of 1.3 billion imposed a strict shutdown in late March, which Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has credited with keeping cases to a modest 70,000, with around 2,000 deaths.
But the lockdown, which enters its 50th day on Wednesday, has torpedoed the economy, snatching the livelihoods of tens of millions of people and hitting the poor the hardest.
Whole industries have been devastated and there are fears of food shortages, while a ban on flights has left hundreds of thousands of Indians stranded abroad.
Restrictions have been steadily eased, however, particularly in rural areas, and some Indian trains — on a network which normally carries over 20 million passengers a day — were scheduled to resume on Tuesday.
More than 54,000 tickets for an initial 30 services sold out online within three hours on Monday, reports said. The first train was to leave New Delhi at 4:00 pm (1030 GMT), followed by others from Kolkata, Bangalore and Mumbai.
The government has not set out a programme for when more services will resume. There were limited special services laid on after the lockdown was imposed to ferry home some of the millions of poor migrant workers left jobless and destitute by the shutdown.
Many people, however, were forced to walk hundreds of miles (kilometres) to get home. Passengers for Tuesday’s mostly inter-city services were told to arrive at stations 90 minutes before departure for health screening, and to bring their own food for the journey.—AFP
