US nationals choose to stay back in India

Covid 19 fear hovering all over

Monday, 13th April 2020

As US becomes the worst hit country by corona virus, US nationals in India prefer to stay back even after running special flights by the US department to take back stranded Americans home. US president, Trump tweeted that more than 50,000 people had already been taken back.

“We had multiple thousands when we put in India the call out for expression of interest in a flight, and yet over this weekend, our staff in India literally cold-called 800 people asking if they wanted to get on a flight today. We got 10 positive responses, 10 out of 800 calls. So that’s just an indication of the uncertainty of some of these numbers we’re looking at”, said Ian Brownlee, US state department official. He also mentioned about them tracking 24,000 US nationals.

MEA had arranged for the repatriation of 20,473 foreign nationals from India, said Damu Ravi, MEA’s additional secretary.

444 Australia nationals have been repatriated on a special flight from New Delhi.

20,000 Britons out of 35,000 chose to return to UK. “We are doing all we can to get thousands of British travelers in India home. This is a huge and complex operation which also involves working with the Indian government to enable people to move within India to get on these flights. Over 300 people arrived from Goa on Thursday morning, 1,400 more will arrive over the Easter weekend and these 12 flights next week will bring back thousands more”, said Tariq Ahmad, UK minister of state (South Asia and the commonwealth).