New Delhi: India’s Home Ministry has said a total of 9,000 Tablighi Jamaat workers have been identified so far and wholesome efforts are being made to hunt their contacts as the group has emerged as a major source of Covid-19 infection across the country.

Of the 9,000 workers who have been to the Tablighi Jamaat headquarters in Delhi's Nizamuddin area, prompting authorities to intensify efforts to trace them since they may be carrying the virus and potentially infecting others, 1,306 are foreigners and the remaining are Indian nationals.

They are among those who attended a religious congregation organised by the Tablighi Jamaat at the Nizamuddin Markaz last month, which led to a sudden spike in coronavirus cases in different parts of the country.

Addressing a press conference on Covid-19 here, Punya Salila Srivastava, Joint Secretary at the Home Ministry, said that these are among the 2,346 workers who have been evacuated from Tablighi Jamaat's six-storey mosque complex called Markaz in Nizamuddin since March 29.

Out of these 2,346 people, 250 were foreigners, Srivastava said, adding that a total of 1,804 persons have been shifted to different quarantine centres while 334 positive cases have been hospitalised.

In a frantic search for thousands of people who participated in the Tablighi Jamaat congregation, the government on Wednesday directed the states and Union Territories (UTs) to complete their contact tracing on a "war footing" to mitigate the spread of Covid-19.

The aim is not only to trace those who attended the congregation, but also those they came into contact with, thus inadvertently creating new clusters of Covid-19 infection across the country.