Indian Railways offers coronavirus lifeline, delivering food, turning carriages into hospital wards, and building a prototype ventilator

For the first time in its 167-year history, India’s national rail company has halted passenger services, but it has not been idle amid the coronavirus pandemic

It has turned coaches into isolation wards for Covid-19 patients, is shipping food to markets and cooking meals for the poor, and making hospital equipment

Reading Time:3 minutes

Indian Railways has thrown its weight behind the fight against the coronavirus. The exterior of a Covid-19 isolation coach in New Delhi, India. Photo: Amrit Dhillon

Published: 10:15am, 13 Apr 2020Updated: 10:47am, 13 Apr 2020

When you have chugged through wars, famines, and floods, what’s a virus? For the first time in 167 years, Indian Railways has stopped its trains because of the lockdown to curb the spread of coronavirus, but such a monumental machine never really shuts down; it keeps humming in hibernation mode. India’s national railway system has retooled to feed the hungry and move essential supplies, and turned its coaches into isolation wards.

A system that ensures all the necessary members of staff and equipment are in the right place each day to move 16 million people from point A to point B along 67,368 kilometres (41,861 miles) of track aboard more than 20,000 trains can rise to the challenge of a pandemic with equanimity.

Ever since Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a nationwide lockdown on March 24, the railway company has been injecting fresh meaning into the tired cliché that it is the lifeline of the country, which of course it is. With trains sitting idle, it has converted 2,500 coaches into isolation wards for Covid-19 patients who are not critically ill; since the coronavirus can spread within spaces that are centrally air-conditioned, it used non-air-conditioned train carriages.

The carriages have been sanitised, berths have been turned into beds, medical equipment installed, space made for medical supplies, and a nurse’s station and a doctor’s cabin created in each. One carriage can take 16 patients. The number of beds these carriages provide is 40,000, and every day 375 more carriages are being converted.

Indian Railways is converting carriages into hospital rooms to help in the Covid-19 fight. Photo: Twitter / @Piyush Goyal

The mobility of these moving wards will be invaluable if the number of Covid-19 cases in India starts spiking. So far, it has been relatively fortunate. For a population of 1.3 billion, 6,653 confirmed cases and 199 deaths as of April 10 are relatively small numbers. The converted trains can be sent to places where hospitals feel overwhelmed.