The Tamil Nadu government and the railway ministry are locked in a tussle on where to house the 1,000 odd passengers who will be arriving in Chennai on Thursday evening by an AC train they boarded at Delhi on Wednesday.
Railway Minister Piyush Goyal has rejected a suggestion by state Chief Minister Edappadi K. Palaniswami that the passengers be quarantined in converted railway coaches or railway buildings till they undergo the RT-PCR test and are declared as Covid negative. Goyal has pointed out that as per the SOP the passengers need only to be home quarantined after which they need to be monitored by health officials of the state government or through Arogya Setu app if they volunteered.
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The Tamil Nadu government has complained that it was not consulted before the train to Chennai was announced and the bookings opened. Since Southern Railway had converted 500 coaches as isolation wards, the passenger could be housed there till the PCR tests cleared them, the Chief Minister has suggested. In view of the present stand-off between the state and the railway ministry, the second of the biweekly train to leave on Friday evening from Delhi is now in doubt.
The state government may now offer the passengers the option of staying in hotels identified for the purpose but at their own costs. “They have to stay in hotels only till the test results arrive which is normally two days,” said a state official. It is doubtful if the train passengers might agree to this as many would be travelling to their respective destinations outside Chennai by private vehicles.
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The state government’s reservation about hosting a new group of 1,000 people is understandable in the light of the Koyambedu wholesale vegetable market in Chennai turning into a super spreader with over 3,000 cases reported from there since April end. Out of the state’s total count of 9,227 cases till Wednesday evening, 35 per cent were linked to the vegetable market, which has now been closed by the state government.
The state government was patting itself of having traced and isolated 1,365 cases from the Tablighi Jamaat congregation in Delhi in March and another 4,000 odd from foreign arrivals. Most of these cases have been treated and discharged after testing covid negative. A few days after the Chief Minister had expressed hope about flattening the curve the vegetable market cluster exploded on the state government’s face.
On Wednesday Chief Minister Palaniswami, while addressing district collectors, refuted the charge that the state government was blindsided by the vegetable market becoming a cluster in spite of repeated media reports about crowds jostling in the market. Palaniswami said that the traders had resisted closing down the market in spite of repeated persuasions by the state officials. The government wanted them move to different locations so the market could be decentralised.
Though the traders have been given a temporary market place in Thirumazhisai, further away from the city, they are unhappy about the facilities as all the displaced traders have not been accommodated. We are urging them to relocate near other retail vegetable markets of the city so the new location does not become an action replay of Koaymbedu,” said a senior IAS officer.
