Rail authorities have decided to increase the number of trains when suburban services resume on Wednesday.
The plan was to start with 362 trains — 228 in Sealdah division, 100 in Howrah division and 34 in Kharagpur division. The new plan is to start with close to 700 trains — 410 in Sealdah, 200 in Sealdah and 81 in Kharagpur.
The Howrah and Sealdah divisions are with Eastern Railway and the Kharagpur division with South Eastern Railway.
South Eastern Railway has already issued a statement saying 81 trains will run from Wednesday. Eastern Railway is still to come up with a formal announcement but rail officials said the number had been increased in anticipation of a rush in passengers from Day 1.
The increased number, though, is less than 50 per cent of the number of daily trains that ran in the three divisions before the pandemic.
Doctors and public health experts have said a reduced fleet and lack of access control mechanisms at suburban stations would result in more crowds and trigger a surge in the spread of the novel coronavirus.
“It would have been difficult to manage the rush with 200 trains. Since there is no way of controlling the access of passengers, we thought we should at least run some more trains,” a rail official in the Sealdah division said.
A final set of standard operating procedures for running the trains is expected to be finalised by Monday.
Rail officials have maintained the state government will have to work out the modalities of crowd control at stations.
Apart from the state police, the RPF and the GRP are expected to be deployed at stations but there is little cops can do, said officials.
Local trains in Bengal will run for all passengers. The state government has hinted it would not go for any “exclusionary” tech-based access control method. That means anyone with a valid ticket cannot be stopped from entering a station or boarding a train.
Rail officials pleaded helplessness in ensuring a curtailed occupancy of trains.
“We can try to ensure that each passenger wears a mask. That’s about it. Any effort to limit the number of people on each train might backfire and trigger a law-and-order problem,” an Eastern Railway official said.
The number of trains might go up after a few days but even a short time is enough for the virus to surge, doctors have said.