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The Center began making preparations on Friday for dozens of special flights early next month to take thousands of Indians stranded abroad due to cancellation of international flights beginning March 22.
For nearly a week, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has held talks with senior ministers and officials about ways to bring stranded Indians back home, people familiar with the events told the Hindustan Times.
Cabinet Secretary Rajiv Gauba took the first step as part of this exercise on Friday, telling state governments to assign hospital beds and quarantine zones for Indian citizens trapped abroad who will be brought back in special flights after the national closure ends. Gauba, the country’s largest bureaucrat, issued the instructions in his video conference with top secretaries and police chiefs on Friday.
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To be sure, there was no formal decision to lift the shutdown on May 3. But the government’s midnight decision to allow stores to open in residential areas indicated that the government was heading in this direction.
Regardless of the decision made by Prime Minister Narendra Modi (he is interacting with the chief ministers on Monday to hear their views), officials say it is clear that many of the restrictions in force during the shutdown would be gradually eased.
“This is the right time to start reaffirming the exercise to evacuate Indians abroad … It will be a gigantic exercise,” said a senior government official.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is beginning the process to make an assessment of the people who want to return to India. The authorities estimate that it will not only be the Indians who have been stranded abroad who want to return, but also others.
For example, according to a government estimate, only Kerala expects 1,00,000 expatriates to return, for a visit to meet their family, if not for a longer duration, when the flights begin to operate.
The other states expecting a large influx of citizens abroad are Delhi, Maharashtra Punjab, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, and Tamil Nadu.
A separate control room is being established within MEA for the same purpose.
When the first cases of coronavirus disease began to be reported in the country in February, many state governments were unprepared and had expressed doubts about their ability to have the infrastructure to accommodate their citizens abroad. There were hardly any medical or quarantine facilities ready for them.
That was one of the reasons why the government had cornered the army and paramilitary forces to accommodate the more than 600 Indians who returned from Wuhan from China.
In his meeting with top state officials, Gauba told them to go into overdrive to create the necessary facilities for the Indians to return after May 3. He also indicated the basic rules of how the gigantic exercise would be carried out.
State governments have been told that Indian citizens evacuated from abroad will be taken to the closest international airport to their state to minimize internal travel requirements. States have also been told that arriving passengers will be immediately taken to quarantine centers where they will have to spend a minimum of 14 days.
Since March 22, when the ban on international commercial flights was imposed, stranded Indians have been increasingly pressing the government to allow it to return to the country. It is for this reason that Foreign Minister S Jaishankar has been in constant contact with his Gulf and Saudi Arabian counterparts to ask them to take care of the Indians stranded there and to assure them that they will be evacuated as soon as possible. These countries host more than 9 million Indian diasporas in the region. With the Gulf region more than accommodating to Indian requests, the government had also placed medical supplies and assistance as the highest priority for these nations.
