Avishek G Dastidar

Northern Railway, which made the breakthrough after another railway unit failed to get its samples passed, has raw material to make 3,000 coverall suits.

The move is an attempt to give a big push to develop a database of robust numbers and add to the intended usefulness of the tech.

These passengers have been waiting for their trains since Sunday, March 22, when the government observed Janata Curfew. The “curfew” ended, but their wait for a train did not.

The heart of the device is the compressed air container to work the Ambu bag with air without any moving parts like servo motor or piston or link mechanism.

For the country’s Railway system, described with the beaten-to-death cliché “Lifeline of India”, shutting itself down indefinitely and directing its vast machinery to keep only the essentials running required just a flipping back of a few pages.

India coronavirus lockdown: Indian Railways suspended all its services on March 22. Only trains which were already running were allowed to reach their destinations.

The 'National Preparedness Survey on COVID-19' says in its prelude to one of the questions that the government’s aim was to “evade further community transmission” and chalk out a strategy in case community transmission takes place.

Owing to a complete halt of construction activity, at least 300 goods trains full of cement are lying idle at unloading points. Other commodities, too, are facing a similar situation.

During an interaction on Monday with Union Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal, exporters said if India does not begin shipments at this juncture, its export market will be taken over by Chinese products.

Earlier in the day, the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, in its first statement on the issue, said 154 COVID-19 cases across the country had been traced to the Delhi meet.

The three trains from Hazrat Nizamuddin to Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Tamil Nadu covered a distance of over around 2,000 km through multiple states.

Not taking chances with quality, the defence lab has beesn pressed into service and it has so far received samples from manufacturers in Ludhiana, Delhi and Ambala.

Based on the kind of scale indicated to it, the Railways on Monday sounded out its zonal units that it may need to convert up to 20,000 coaches into isolation units in coming days and issued orders to start with converting 5,000 coaches.

Union Home Secretary Ajay Bhalla sent a letter to chief secretaries of all states and UTs clarifying what is allowed as per the latest order.

Through 24 hours after the Janata Curfew on March 22, an estimated 10,000 migrant workers from Maharashtra travelled to Bihar in five special trains.

Two of the four toilets have been converted into bathrooms. The middle berth on one side in each cabin has been removed while the lower berth there will act as the patient bed. It is envisaged that each coach will comfortably hold around 10 patients and all the other three berths opposite the patient berth have been removed.

Passengers who had cancelled their planned journeys during this period would get the entire money back now.

Colleagues and family members have been placed on quarantine, including her mother, sources said.

“The men are primarily construction workers returning from Hyderabad to different parts of Rajasthan,” Rajkumar said, adding that police were probing how they had managed to get that far from Hyderabad without being intercepted.