The Bengal government on Tuesday expressed its inability to bring back 5,000-odd students stranded in Rajasthan’s educational hub of Kota because of logistical issues amid the lockdown and objection from the Bihar administration to let them through.

There were requests from the families of the Bengal students at Kota for their return.

“Something that has been repeatedly coming to us is that in Kota of Rajasthan, a lot of our state’s students — four-five thousand of them — went to take coaching and got stranded,” chief secretary Rajiva Sinha said.

“First of all, we think when a pan-India lockdown is in place, taking so many people from one end of the country to another is not the right thing to do.”

“It is a huge task to bring four-five thousand people all the way from Kota to Calcutta. It is a long journey, with other states in between. Bihar is not allowing the journey.”

The BJP government in Uttar Pradesh had on April 18, brought back 3,000-odd students of the state stranded in Kota in around 100 buses.

Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar of the JDU, an ally of the BJP, had said the evacuation by the UP government was selective and in violation of the lockdown. Pointing out that students staying in Kota hailed from well-to-do families and a majority of them stayed with their guardians there,

Nitish wondered what the urgency was for the Uttar Pradesh government to get them home while migrant workers from Bihar and elsewhere were stranded at various places.

Sinha said the Bengal government thought such a large evacuation should not be done amid the lockdown.

“Despite that, we were asked to take a sympathetic view of this. Whether it is possible on humanitarian grounds. The logistics… is not possible. We have to organise more than 300 buses that will have three night halts on the way from Kota to Bengal. It is not possible to get so many people from Rajasthan to Bengal now.”

For the 1,500km journey from Kota to Calcutta, the buses need to cross Madhya Pradesh, UP, Bihar and Jharkhand.

Sinha said he would speak to his Rajasthan counterpart D.B. Gupta and Bengal’s nodal officer P.B. Salim was in touch with Shreya Guha, the nodal officer in the western state, looking after the students in Kota.

“To those in Kota, our humble request… they have already gone through so much, if they can hold on for a few more days. If there is any specific help necessary, our officers are in touch with specific officers there. They will take necessary steps, for sure.”

Nod for industries

Sinha said the state government had so far received 2,227 applications from industries and enterprises for permission to resume operations amid the lockdown, and 713 had already received the go-ahead.