After completion of their prison term in last year, thousands of Indians, mostly in the USA and Kuwait, were deported to the country on special flights, according to a report by the Covid Cell Foreign Office reporting on flight operations during the Covid pandemic.
4,000 deportees were returned by the US and Kuwait alone. The report by foreign affairs ministry gave details of the Vande Bharat Mission, India’s largest exercise of repatriation launched on 7 May last year, to bring citizens stranded outside India back as a result of the pandemic, some Indians also returned on amnesty flights.
“These flights were mostly operated by Govt. of Kuwait to send to India those people who had turned illegal on expiry of their visa in that country. The Govt. of Kuwait paid for these amnesty flights and also indicated that the workers on return to India could re-apply for work visa at a later date,” the report said.
“Another category of people who returned to India were deportees, a category of people who, upon completion of a prison sentence in their country, needed to be brought back to India by special flights at the expenses of the sending countries,” it added.
The countries were concerned with the movement of migrant workers among the States and were also confronted with the challenge of allowing stranded Indians to go to work in their own homes while migrants remained stuck and confronted by difficulty,” he said.
According to the Ministry of Aviation, repatriation, currently in its 11th phase, has brought to India 2,06 million passengers. But by December 2020, the most critical stage of the operation came to an end when most Indians were returned.
The report acknowledged that Indians living in remote areas of Latin America and the Caribbean, West Africa, and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries were unable to be reached due to geographical distances and logistical challenges posed by internal lockdowns in these countries.
“Also, VBM operations to specific locations in those regions were not found to be economically viable. Gathering stranded Indians to a hub, say, to either Panama City or Sao Paulo was explored but found not feasible. Plans to bring them to the US and put them on VBM flights did not materialise for the same reasons as well as due to visa issues… Ethiopian Airlines with an extensive network in African region was useful in bringing back stranded Indians in remote parts,” it said.
The report stressed that the Directorate General of Civil Aviation had to approve the return of Indians by foreign carriers (DGCA). Despite the DGCA’s reluctance to encourage these options that may inadvertently compete with VBM flights, the Covid Cell, led by the external affairs ministry, which was coordinating citizen repatriation, had to go to the civil aviation regulator for approvals on a case-by-case basis.
Without the external affairs ministry or its missions, the Centre also allowed chartered flights to fly passengers in coordination with state governments and the DGCA. “This simplified procedure greatly aided Indian associations in quickly bringing back stranded Indians in large numbers,” the report stated, noting that by October 2020, such chartered flights had brought back 1.2 million people, surpassing the number of passengers brought in by VBM flights.
