Tea stall owners at rly station suffer as business fails to pick up

Ludhiana: Even since the strict lockdown after the outbreak of Covid-19, rail transportation service was largely affected. But this has further brought untold misery upon authorised tea stall owners at Ludhiana railway station, who didn’t earn even a single penny for the past two months, struggling to manage their daily expenses.
Although the Railways have resumed its service of long-route passengers trains to different states, but it has not provided any sort of relief to tea stall owners who are struggling to find a chance to work under these tough circumstance with shortage of manpower and resources.
There are almost 15 vendors who used to run the business of serving hot tea and coffee to around 80,000 passengers passing through city station during peak hours when heavy rush appeared for catching long-route trains. But after the outbreak of Covid-19, they are struggling to find even a single customer for selling tea and coffee and hve not been able to earn a single penny for managing the household expenses.
In the wake of the present conditions, some tea stall owners have refused to open their stalls at the station and adopted some other way of earning their livelihood like selling vegetables or working in grocery stores for home delivery.
A tea stall owner, Ashok Gupta, who is working at the city station for the past 30 years, said, “I have been working as an authorised tea stall owner at the city station for the last three decades but have not seen such a crisis in life. I never imagined in my life that such a bad situation would be there and now many tea sellers will have to generate some source of income for managing family expenses.”
He further said, “For almost 70 days, all authorised tea as well food stall owners didn’t earn even a single penny. After the resumption of train services, now new terms and conditions were imposed on us about don’t serve unpacked food item to passengers and only take away system would be allowed. Due to this, our business has totally come to end and we have decided not to open stalls for next several days until the situation returns to normalcy.”
Another tea stall owner, Rajesh Sharma, said, “A sense of fear is there among passengers, who are totally avoiding food stalls in view of safeguarding their health. But they should thinks that we are like daily wagers who manage their expenses with everyday earnings.”