Seven days into the first lockdown, the Indian Railways (IR) decided to run a lot of trains — but without a single passenger on board. These were the trains or rakes (of 24 coaches each), to use the ministry’s term, that were caught outside their home bases when the lockdown was announced.
In retrospect, this was a fortuitous decision. “When the government decided to run the Shramik Specials, many zones would have been caught wrong-footed, without train sets to pick up the migrant workers,” a former IR official pointed out. The expected ferrying of ...
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First Published: Thu, May 07 2020. 00:03 IST
