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At least 20 migrant workers returning to Odisha on a special Shramik train from Ahmedabad, a hot spot for coronavirus disease (Covid-19) in Gujarat, allegedly jumped off the train in the Angul district on Sunday night to evade the 28-day mandatory quarantine of the Odisha government. applied three days ago.
On Sunday night, the train slowed down near a railway bridge at Majhika in the Angul district, when about 20 migrant workers jumped. “Although at least 20 of them had tried to escape, we caught only seven and turned them over to the police,” said Birabara Nayak, the Benagadia gram panchayat sarpanch.
Angul Police Superintendent (SP) Jagmohan Meena said the seven people belonged to the neighboring Deogarh district. “They fear staying in an institutional quarantine facility for 28 days. They have been housed in a quarantine center in the Angul district,” the SP said.
In a separate incident, a bus carrying 30 Odisha migrants, returning home from the Kanchipuram district of Tamil Nadu, dropped off 15 of them in Cuttack city on Monday morning instead of taking them to a quarantine center. in the Jagatsinghpur district. Authorities placed six of them at Cuttack University, which became a quarantine center, and the remaining nine traveled to the Jagatsinghpur district in a self-rickshaw.
The state government had announced three days ago that it would be mandatory to quarantine returning migrant workers for 28 days after noting a longer incubation period for the Sars-CoV-2 virus that causes the disease.
The return of migrants to Odisha from Gujarat, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka has been attributed to an increase in Covid-19 positive cases during the past fortnight, including 300 of the total of 391 reported from the state so far.
There were also incidents of migrants fleeing quarantine centers in Odisha last week. For example, 150 migrants in the Beguniapada block of the Ganjam district fled the quarantine center due to poor food quality and lack of clean water at the facility. Some migrants from the Bhadrak coastal district, who returned from Gujarat Surat, got off the bus several kilometers in front of the quarantine center and went directly to their homes.
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