To ensure timely delivery of essential medicines, the Central Railway (CR) coordinated with other zones so that a parcel from Nagpur could reach Ludhiana, despite there being no direct train between the two cities.
The CR received a request from one Sukhdev Mandar, who needed a certain type of medicine to be procured from Nagpur.
Mr. Mandar, who returned from Canada around four years ago, said he was taking a particular tablet, which was a cocktail of four drugs, prescribed to him by doctors in Canada, for an immunity-related ailment. “While I could not get the same drug here, I was taking two pills, each having two of the drugs in the original combination, as substitutes and procured them directly from a pharma company based in Delhi,” he said.
The person he would interact with in Delhi left for Nagpur just before the lockdown was imposed and took Mr. Mandar’s medicines along in the hope of transporting them from Nagpur. “I was told that there were no direct trains from Nagpur to Ludhiana, so I created a Twitter account and put a message with my problem as I was fast running out of the medicines,” he said.
A day after he put the query, the chief parcel supervisor (CPS) from Nagpur, Shekhar Balekar, called him to understand the requirement. “Initially they told me that they could only send the medicines up to New Delhi. But a day later, Mr. Balekar said they had booked my parcel till Ludhiana,” Mr. Mandar said.
The medicines were booked on a train to Itarsi, where they were unloaded and the put on another train travelling from Hyderabad and to Amritsar, a day later. “While boarding my medicine, they took videos and photos of the box and gave me the box number, since the package was small. They were also in constant touch with the CPS in Itarsi and Ludhiana and had given their numbers to me as well,” Mr. Mandar said.
Krishnath Patil, senior divisional commercial manager, Nagpur Division, CR, said they did not do transshipment under normal circumstances, but decided to coordinate since these were extraordinary circumstances. The medicines reached Mr. Mandar on Sunday. He said that he had only one dose remaining, for Monday, and didn’t know what he would have done if the medicines had not come on time. “Under the current circumstances, these medicines were crucial. I have only the Railways to thank for ensuring it reached me,” he said.
