Experiences by rail, air passengers expose Centre-state coordination

The differing experiences between rail and air passengers after the limited resumption of services have underlined the criticality of Centre-state coordination

Domestic air travel in India resumed after 63 days but not without its controversies and uncertainty over what happens when the passengers touch down. State governments, especially those with a high number of Covid-19 cases, want their borders closed even if passengers come into their territory by air and travel in more sanitised conditions than those who board Shramik special trains and the new “time-tabled” trains that started last week.

The first train taking stranded labourers, students and pilgrims ran on May 1. The Ministry of Railways till then had maintained secrecy regarding the restarting of trains — so much so that it even vehemently denied media reports of any planned standard operating procedures (SOPs). This was principally on account of its own missteps. On April 14, the last day of the first phase of lockdown, thousands gathered at Mumbai’s Bandra West railway station in the hope of getting back home. A Marathi TV channel had run a report saying how the government was planning special trains. The Mumbai police lathicharged the hapless crowd. While the gathering, just like many others at bus stations earlier, threw social distancing norms out of the window, the Railways reacted by clamping down on any information on when or how travel will resume.

Such was the secrecy that the notification from the Union home ministry to start the Shramik specials came after the first train had already left from Lingampalli in Telangana at 5 am on May Day for Hatia in Jharkhand. The starting of these special trains came two days after the Ministry of Home Affairs formally allowed the movement of stranded people by bus but the decision to whether run them or not lay with the state governments.

The resumption of flight services was, however, not shrouded in any secrecy, with Union Aviation Minister Hardeep Singh Puri holding a press conference on May 21 and his ministry issuing SOPs for airlines and airports. But when the first flight, Indigo 6E-2625 from Bangalore to Delhi, was to take off at 12.40 am on Monday, 24 days after passenger train services were restarted, it was cancelled for lack of demand.

The first-day flight schedule was already one third of those in normal times, but it was halved further to 532 flights taking 39,231 passengers to various destinations. Many of these flights reportedly had rows of empty seats while thousands could not board due to last-minute cancellations. On Tuesday, however, Puri revised his own numbers and said 832 flights carried 58,318 the first day which means an average of just 70 passengers a flight.

The same day 30 or 40 trains had to be diverted because of congestion on railway routes, though the Railway Ministry did not put out any official figure. Just two days earlier on May 23, a train headed to Gorakhpur in Uttar Pradesh arrived in Odisha’s Rourkela adding to the harassment of passengers stranded since March 22. Railway Board chairman Vinod Kumar Yadav, in a press conference the same day, attributed these diversions to around 80 per cent of Shramik special trains going to Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. “The congestion had occurred due to convergence of more than two-third of rail traffic on routes to Bihar and Uttar Pradesh and late clearance of the terminals due to health protocols, and so on that needed to be completed by state authorities,” said the Railway Board in a statement on Monday.

So, while resumed air flights are not getting enough passengers, trains are being diverted on account of congestion. Till May 25, the Railways ran 3,274 Shramik specials ferrying 440,000 passengers in 25 days. Officially, the Railways maintains the congestion witnessed in the railway network on May 23 and 24 is over. The Railways are also running 30 pairs of special trains connecting New Delhi from May 12 and plans to start 200 more “time-table” trains on June 1. “The matter has been resolved through active consultation with state governments and by finding other feasible routes for the journey,” said the railway statement.

Under the Indian Constitution, aviation and railways are central subjects. So in normal times or even while closing these services, the Union government is within its right to run them the way it wants. Nevertheless, state governments before the total lockdown had asked the Narendra Modi government to close the two services. Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal stirred up a controversy in March when he ordered the closure of the world’s busiest airport in Delhi. The Union government reacted by overturning the order and reminding him that the airport was outside his jurisdiction. But by then, Maharashtra and West Bengal had already made appeals to close the rail and air services so the issue became moot.

Unlike the Railways, which left it to the states to decide the health protocol they would follow for the arriving passengers, there was total confusion for the air travellers on Saturday and Sunday over whether the receiving states would impose quarantine, for how long and whether it would involve staying in government-owned units or paid facilities. With some states refusing to allow flights, the Union Home Ministry had to issue a fresh set of guidelines just for rail, air and road transport. Nevertheless, the fact that no state wants people from Covid-19 red zones to enter their territories has meant that a federal or central subject has to be a state government matter in times of crisis.