Ever since the lockdown happened due to the CoronaVirus, the return to travel has been slow due to a couple of reasons. Firstly, with most organisations having moved to Work From Home and put in place mandates not to travel unless necessary, business travel has been reduced to negligible. For personal travel, people have only travelled if they were not at their home base and wanted to travel back to their home and so on. Vacation travel has been postponed as well.

The requirements after air travel opened up have been ever-changing, with states responding to their situations at various points of time. For instance, when air travel opened up, Mumbai only allowed 25 flights a day to come in from all parts of the country and then later took up that to 50 flights. West Bengal did not allow flights for a while from 6 states, including Maharashtra.

Karnataka is now open for travel.

One of the states that are now taking an opposite approach, and beginning to open up again is Karnataka. Karnataka has withdrawn all standard CoVid-19 travel restrictions for all sorts of passengers, including air, train and bus travellers. This means, passengers no longer need to register on the Karnataka Seva Sindhu portal. They won’t be subject to a medical check-up at the airport, railway/bus stations or at the entry posts at the borders.

No longer would be people coming into Karnataka be subject to a 14-day quarantine or stamped on arrival. Not just that, if they are heading to home in Karnataka, their homes won’t receive any sticker which tells others about their status of having arrived from out of state.

Here is the notification issued by the state to this effect:

Guidelines for interstate travellers to Karnataka

Like you can read above, if travellers are asymptomatic on arrival, they are allowed to report to work in the state without any 14-day home quarantine. However, they should monitor their health and call the helpline if they develop any COVID-19 symptoms like cold, cough, fever and difficulty in breathing.

If symptomatic on arrival, Karnataka they should self-isolate and seek medical attention immediately or call the Apthamitra helpline. They should follow standard COVID-19 protocol like self-isolation, wearing a mask, physical distancing, hand washing and sanitisation.

Bottomline

With this approach, Karnataka becomes one of the first states in India to open up for business as usual on travel. Other states such as Delhi have never had any strict regulations for people coming in, and Goa recently opened up with stringent norms for tourists. The good news is, if you have family or friends in Karnataka, you can now visit them again as long as you feel comfortable to travel again.

What do you make of Karnataka’s move to open up travel to the state?

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