Ministry expects return of all migrants in early April

The country will help all the migrant workers get back to their work in the first half of April thanks to a series of measures that have been taken, officials said.

To facilitate migrant workers return to their posts, the Ministry of Transport has been promoting point-to-point charted buses that enjoy "green channel" services in 27 provincial regions, Cai Tuanjie, deputy director of transportation service, told a news conference on Saturday.

In addition to be exempted from toll fees, these buses will subject to no inspection. A 24-hour hotline has also been launched to help address problems migrant workers face, he said.

In Sichuan province, for example, chartered buses have served about 1.7 million migrant workers in 80,000 trips, he said.

He said the ministry has also taken various measures to ensure migrant workers' safety.

Only half of the carrying capacity of the chartered buses can be used if they are from regions with high or medium-level risk for the novel coronavirus transmission to reduce the probability of infection, he noted.

Meanwhile, all the chartered buses will go nonstop until they arrive at their destinations and nobody will be allowed to board en route, he said.

The ministry has also been resuming cross-city and cross-region bus services, he added.

"We expect that the transportation of migrant workers back to their posts will be completed in the first half of April," he said.

China Railway has also offered point-to-point services to help migrant workers back to work.

Since Feb 16 when the company launched the first train especially for migrant workers, China railway has organized 246 such trains and 1,100 charted train carriages for migrant workers as of Friday, which has helped migrant workers in 270,000 trips, said Huang Xin, chief of passenger services at China Railway.

He said another 25 special trains and 99 chartered train carriages are going to be launched soon.

The Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security has launched two online platforms to help migrant workers get back to their work- one for enterprises and one for the workers.

Enterprises can register information of their employees confronted with difficulties to get back to their posts on the platform for them. Migrant can could upload their information in the other platform.

Though launched only for five days, the platform for enterprises has seen 7,383 companies register information for almost 60,000 of their employees and helped almost 9,000 of the workers return to work, said Zhang Ying, director of the employment promotion at the ministry.