Union Railway Minister Piyush Goyal said on Tuesday that the claims that trains transporting migrants take around 7 to 9 days to reach their destinations were completely false and baseless.
"Reports that trains are taking seven days, nine days are baseless, false and are completely motivated to damage the huge effort that my Railway employees, working day and night without sleep, are making to transport the migrants," Goyal said.
The Union Minister added that until 25 May, 3265 trains had been sent to take the labourers back, and that almost all had reached their destinations. Some trains going to the north-east are still on the run, he added.
Goyal also mentioned that 238 trains were sent on 24th and that they would reach their destinations on 26th evening.
With thousands of migrants walking home from all over the country, there has been a huge outcry from opposition leaders, state governments, activists, academicians etc for the government to ensure that they are sent home safely during this lockdown period.
Recently, Piyush Goyal hit back at Uddhav Thackeray who said that Maharashtra was in need of 80 special migrant trains a day but was only receiving 40.
Goyal tweeted a dozen times since this accusation was made and said that his ministry was willing to provide the necessary number of trains to the Maharashtra government at the earliest, if they in turn would provide the ministry with the details of passenger names, their medical history etc.
He further tweeted that despite 1.5 hours having passing since the required assistance was promised, the Maharashtra government was yet to provide the required details. Goyal then went on two tweet at intervals, with the last post being tweeted at around 2 AM.
Sanjay Raut, a Shiv Sena MP responded to these tweets by mentioning that the government had provided the details of passengers and had also requested Goyal that a train to Gorakhpur should not reach Odisha. This response was in reference to an earlier mix up when a train from Maharashtra that was slated to reach UP arrived in Odisha instead.
