Corona upsurge: With no precautions, Railways chugs along risky track amid COVID-19 alert

Clearly unmindful of the threat posed by coronavirus to the thousands of passengers who either start or end their journey at the MGR Chennai Central railway station, the Southern Railway is not screening even a sample section of the people coming to the station. The laxity is putting even railway officials themselves at risk of being infected with the virus.

A little past 5 pm on Friday, the staff at the helpdesk set up by St John’s Ambulance in the concourse area were seen busy chatting even as thousands of passengers walked past them. There are neither the thermal scanners to screen passengers, nor hand sanitisers to keep the officials – who come into contact with hundreds of passengers from across the country – safe. The N95 face masks and gloves that they had sported when the Divisional Railway Manager, Chennai, had inaugurated the help desk only three days ago were missing.

Though the more than 1.10 lakh persons who arrive and depart from the station are from across the country, the awareness pamphlets distributed by the Press Information Bureau (PIB), St Johns Ambulance and Railway are only available only in Tamil.

The PIB officials deployed there told DT Next that pamphlets were available only in Tamil as they were instructed by senior officials from Delhi to arrange them locally. The staff at the PIB exhibition in the main concourse area near eateries admitted that only 2,000 pamphlets were distributed – less than two per cent of the number of people visiting there every day.

There are about 20 banners explaining the dos and don’ts about coronavirus. However, none of the them are in Hindi though a large number of passengers are Hindi speakers.

There, however, was one silver lining in the cloud: the waiting areas at the terminal are very clean thanks to the intensive cleaning work undertaken there. Also, a large number of bins to dump garbage have been kept there since March 11 after the Southern Railway launched intensive drive to clean up the premises as part of the effort to fight the spread of the virus.