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The United Arab Emirates has asked the government to send Indian doctors and nurses to help the Emirates fight the Covid-19 pandemic, a senior government official said Tuesday.
The UAE, a federation of seven emirates with a population of less than 10 million people, has already reported 11,000 cases of Covid-19 and added an average of 500 patients each day.
It relies heavily on foreign educated doctors and paramedics, including those from India, for its hospital staff.
Some of them were on leave when the Delhi and Abu Dhabi governments canceled all commercial flights to prevent coronavirus diseases from spreading to their respective countries.
“We have received two requests. One, to allow health care providers traveling to India when commercial flights were canceled to return to the United Arab Emirates to resume their functions, ”a senior government official told the Hindustan Times.
The second is permission to hire or take advantage of the services of doctors and nurses for a shorter period to overcome the immediate crisis.
“The requests are being considered by the government,” said the official.
Authorities said Abu Dhabi had offered to send a special plane to fly Indian health professionals employed by its hospitals.
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Considering the nature of the relationship between the two countries, the first request is likely to be processed first, another official said.
However, the request for additional doctors and paramedical personnel requires broader consultations within the government, the official said. The decision would be made after evaluating India’s requirements at this stage.
But the effort is to find a way out to help the UAE at this crucial juncture.
Just a fortnight ago, India sent a team of 15 military doctors and paramedics to Kuwait and promised to deploy more personnel if necessary.
These gestures, said a Foreign Ministry official, should be seen in the context of how ties between India and the Gulf countries have deepened in the past five to six years.
Since the beginning of the NDA government’s first term in office, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his key advisers have invested diplomatic energy to improve ties with West Asian countries, particularly Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Bahrain, Qatar and Oman.
In 2015, Narendra Modi was the first Indian Prime Minister to visit the UAE, also home to 3.4 million Indian workers, in more than three decades. In total, the six Gulf countries: Saudi Arabia. Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and Bahrain have around 12.6 million Indians.
Personal relationships began to pay off in a few years when National Security Adviser Ajit Doval was able to persuade Gulf countries to expel anti-Indian elements or send them to India.
It was a reflection of this high-octane diplomacy at work that Dubai handed over to Dawood associate Ibrahim and accused 1993 of the Mumbai blasts, Mohammed Farooq and Saudi Arabia deported the Lashkar-e-Taiba operation Habibur Rahman. In total, more than 100 wanted people have been deported to India by the Gulf countries in the past six years. Last year, the United Arab Emirates allowed Indian agencies to expel the AgustaWestland case, accusing Rajiv Saxena and prominent aviation lobbyist Deepak Talwar in a special plane.
More recently, the United Arab Emirates made an exception for Indians when they began firing foreign nationals from almost every other country, including Pakistan, after the outbreak of the coronavirus disease. Since the Indian state governments were not prepared to accommodate Indian citizens abroad, the Indian government had requested to care for them for a while longer. India, for its part, had assured the Gulf countries that New Delhi would maintain an uninterrupted supply of food and essential items from India.
