First special train to Assam arriving with 1,000 passengers

Around 1,000 passengers from Delhi are set to arrive in Guwahati on Wednesday night on board the first train to the state since limited rail services resumed in the country, a senior Northeast Frontier Railway (NFR) official said.

The special train will arrive in Guwahati at night and reach its destination Dibrugarh on Thursday morning, he said.

"The special train with full AC coaches had started its journey from Delhi yesterday with 1,122 passengers, many of whom deboarded during the journey. Around 1,000 passengers are likely to enter Assam tonight," NFR chief public relations officer Subhanan Chanda told PTI.

The special train from Delhi to Dibrugarh and back will run daily and is likely to carry around 1,000 passengers to Assam in each journey, he said.

It will have only five stops in Assam -- Kokrajhar, Guwahati, Lumding, Mariani and Dibrugarh. The state government will take the passengers for necessary health checks and quarantine in view of the coronavirus outbreak.

A 'Shramik Special' train from Chennai will start its journey for Assam on Wednesday night with about 1,200 migrant labourers from the north eastern state. The train will reach Guwahati on May 15, Chanda said.

Asked about the train fares for migrant labourers, Chanda said it was being paid by the originating state, Tamil Nadu in this case.

"We are not charging anything from the labourers," he iterated.

Chanda said that a special train between Delhi and Agartala will run on a weekly basis.

Meanwhile, more than a hundred students and a number of cancer patients reached Assam from Delhi and Chennai on Wednesday and have been put under uarantine at different paces.

"Pleased to share that 6 buses from Delhi with 163 students onboard & one bus from Chennai with 24 cancer patients & attendants have arrived in Guwahati today," State Health Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma said in a tweet.

"Received them & discussed the 14-day mandatory quarantine process which they need to observe now," he added.

On Tuesday, 137 cancer patients and two attendants were brought from Mumbai by the state government in the wake of the severity of COVID-19 pandemic in Maharashtra.

Sarma had said that a three-tier quarantine system has been put in place for people coming by rail and road to contain the spread of the deadly virus.

The first level of the quarantine is at the hospitals, where all symptomatic patients will be treated, the second at the district headquarters and the third at the constituency level, he had said.