Bihar, Punjab and Telangana on Thursday joined three other states in demanding that the Centre run special trains to take migrants stranded in the wake of the lockdown in various parts of the country, saying transporting the workers in buses to their home states was not feasible. Earlier, the chief ministers of Maharashtra, Kerala and Chhattisgarh had demanded that railways should be utilised to ferry the stranded workers to their home states.The demand for special trains gained momentum a day after the Union ministry of home affairs (MHA) allowed inter-state movement by road to facilitate the return of people who are stuck in various cities for the last five months.In a letter to PM Narendra Modi, Punjab chief minister Amarinder Singh cited the MHA’s orders and said given the large number of workers stuck due to the lockdown, the use of buses for their transportation would not work. “Estimates indicate that nearly one million workers will need transport to go back to their states,” he observed, adding that the only feasible option in these circumstances was to arrange “special trains, which the Railways may run from point to point, keeping in view the number of persons to be transported to a given destination.”Bihar deputy CM Sushil Modi also echoed Amarinder’s views. “The numbers are huge and many are stranded in faraway places like Chennai, Bangalore and Mumbai. A bus will take six to seven days to go and come back and practically it is not feasible to bring so many people by buses. It will take more than a month,” Modi said, pointing to the “logistical nightmare” in transporting workers in buses.Telangana minister Talasani Srinivas Yadav also felt that it was not appropriate on the part of the Centre to just allow inter-state movement of workers by arranging special buses by respective states and “wash its hands of the issue”.However, the Centre does not seem to be considering this as an option for now. When asked on the possibility of running special trains, joint secretary in MHA, Punya Salila Srivastava, told journalists in Delhi that the orders issued at present were for using buses.Earlier, Maharashtra CM Uddhav Thackeray had demanded special trains for sending back migrants stuck in his state to their respective hometowns.Kerala CM Pinarayi Vijayan, too, reiterated on Thursday his demand for running special non-stop trains for workers. “There are 3.6 lakh guest workers staying in 20,826 camps spread across Kerala and most of them want to go back to their native places. A large percentage of the guest workers in Kerala are from West Bengal , Assam, Odisha, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. It would not be practical or feasible to transport such a large number of people over such long distances cutting across several states by bus,” he said.Chhattisgarh CM Bhupesh Baghel has also demanded special trains to bring back 90,000-plus workers from his state who are stranded across 21 states.