India to slowly resume passenger trains from May 12

India has announced a plan to gradually restart limited passenger train movement from tomorrow as the country moves to further ease its Covid-19 lockdown imposed a month and halfago.

The number of positive cases today recorded the biggest rise in the last 24 hours, reports our New Delhi correspondent.

Indian railway ministry, in a statement, said last night that 15 pairs of trains (30 return journeys) would initially move out from New Delhi even though the number of coronavirus death count went up to 2,206 and the number of positive cases jumped to over 67,100 in the last 24 hours, the highest single-day spike.

These trains will be run as special trains from New Delhi Station, connecting 16 major cities including Mumbai, Chennai, Howrah, Dibrugarh, Agartala, Patna, Bilaspur, Ranchi, Bhubaneswar, Secunderabad, Bengaluru, Thiruvananthapuram and Ahmedabad.

The move to resume passenger train service on a limited scale across the country came ahead of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's video-conferencing with chief ministers of all states to discuss the coronavirus situation and a possible calibrated plan to exit from the lockdown.

The ministry made it mandatory for passengers to wear face covers and undergo medical screening at departure points and only asymptomatic passengers will be allowed to board the train.

Only onlinebooking for these trains will be available from tomorrow, as ticket booking counters at the railway stations will remain closed and no counter tickets (including platform tickets) will be issued, the statement said.

More than 20 million people use trains across India daily but the train service was halted in the last week of March as the Indian government clamped a strict nationwide lockdown to check the spread of coronavirus.

A limited number of services have been operating in recent days to help stranded poor, rural migrant workers who lost their jobs in the lockdown to return to their villages.

The Indian government has already started relaxing the lockdown, which is due to end on May 17, but interstate public transport and domestic and international flights had so far remain grounded.

After the initial service from May 12, the Indian Railways said it would start more special services on new routes, based on the available coaches after reserving 20,000 coaches for COVID-19 care centres and adequate number of coaches being reserved to enable operation of up to 300 trains everyday for stranded migrants.