The move came amid violent protests against the scheme in different parts of the country since it was announced a few days ago.
Navy chief Admiral R Hari Kumar on Friday termed the Agniveer model as the single biggest human resources management transformation in the Indian military and said that protests in parts of the country over the newly launched Agnipath scheme are happening due to misinformation and misunderstanding.
Protests against 'Agnipath' left Bihar in flames on Friday when rampaging mobs set fire to dozens of railway coaches, engines and stations and torched Bharatiya Janata Party offices, vehicles and other property, prompting the police to suspend internet services in nearly a third of the state.
The railways said these trains will be "special trains run on the pattern of regular trains", covering tier 2 cities and also major state capitals like Mumbai and Kolkata.
'Individuals who have participated in violence and arson should be identified and not be recruited.'
Union Health Ministry data updated on Friday 8 am showed a single-day spike of 81,484 infections, taking the country's COVID-19 tally of cases to 63,94,068, while the death toll climbed to 99,773, with the virus claiming 1,095 lives in a span of 24 hours. However, by night, a PTI tally showed India's COVID-19 caseload at 64,64,012, death toll at 1,00,768 and recoveries at 54,15,197.
The migrants were ferried to their villages in sanitised buses arranged by the Jharkhand government to take them home after preliminary medical screening at the station, officials said.
The Railways has drawn up a schedule to operate 2,600 Shramik Special trains over the next 10 days across the country to ferry around 36 lakh migrant workers, stranded due to the COVID-19 lockdown, to their home states, Chairman of the Railway Board V K Yadav said on Saturday.
While 287 trains have already reached their destinations, 79 trains are in transit, officials said. Out of these 287 trains, 127 terminated in Uttar Pradesh, 87 in Bihar, 24 in Madhya Pradesh, 20 in Odisha, 16 in Jharkhand, four in Rajasthan, three in Maharashtra, two each in Telangana and West Bengal, and one each in Andhra Pradesh and Himachal Pradesh, the officials said.
Out of the 932 trains which have been operated so far, 215 are in transit while 717 have terminated at various stations. Sixty-seven more are in the pipeline, an official said.
What is the lure of a government job? The answer is India's worst kept secret: Job security. And among the many government jobs desperately sought after is in the armed forces. Which is why the riots by aspiring armed forces job seekers against the government's Agnipath scheme should not really be surprising, points out Harishchandra.
A man was shot dead in police firing in Telangana's Secunderabad, trains went up in flames, and public and private vehicles attacked, as railway stations and highways turned into battleground in many states on Friday amid burgeoning protests against Agnipath, the contentious defence recruitment scheme.
'Unlike Andhra Pradesh or Tamil Nadu, there is no opportunity for workers to earn a livelihood in Bihar.'
The nation in a post-coronavirus future could well look back on the pandemic period as a 'blessing in disguise' if Indians imbibe hand, respiratory and environmental hygiene and practise it in their everyday lives, the minister said.
Nobody bothered to articulate the upsides; instead, the four-year tour of duty and denial of life-long pensions got played up.
Job-seekers for government and related opportunities found that their future was at risk, points out Shreekant Sambrani.
What worries health experts is that Bihar's testing rate per million is less than one-third of the national average of 6,622 tests per million, reports M I Khan.
With more than 21 lakh migrant workers returning to the state as per official data, the Nitish Kumar government faces an enormous challenge in providing jobs for them.
Around 275,000 migrant labourers and their family members have returned to the state. According to the state government, this number could exceed 1 million by the end of this month. As the NDA government in Bihar is scheduled to face polls at the end of this year, providing livelihoods to these people is on the top Chief Minister Nitish Kumar's agenda.
A day after opposition parties, including the Congress launched a scathing attack against the Union government and the railways for charging money from migrants for the travel, sources in the railways said the national transporter is spending around Rs 80 lakh per service for the special trains, and it has run 67 such trains carrying around 67,000 stranded migrants since May 1--- incurring an expenditure of over Rs 50 crore.
'The handling of the pandemic, under this totally constitutional and legal three-level dictatorship, has begun to show its downside,' observes Shekhar Gupta.
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