More than 61,000 Indians stranded overseas due to the lockdown have been repatriated since May 7, the government said Thursday.
MEA spokesperson Anurag Srivastava said Phase I of the Vande Bharat mission has been successfully completed from 7 May-16 May, during which 16,716 stranded Indians returned. “We are in the Phase II of VBM from 17 May – 13 June. As of 4.00 pm today, 45,216 Indians have returned. These include 8,069 migrant workers, 7,656 students and 5,107 professionals,” he said.
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About 5000 Indians have returned through land border immigration checkpoints from Nepal and Bangladesh.
A total of 3,08,200 persons have registered their request with Indian Embassies abroad for repatriation to India on compelling grounds.
During the Phase II, a total of 429 Air India flights from 60 countries are scheduled to land in India. The Indian Navy will be making four more sorties to bring back returnees from Iran, Sri Lanka and the Maldives.
Shubhajit Roy, Diplomatic Editor at The Indian Express, has been a journalist for more than 25 years now. Roy joined The Indian Express in October 2003 and has been reporting on foreign affairs for more than 17 years now. Based in Delhi, he has also led the National government and political bureau at The Indian Express in Delhi — a team of reporters who cover the national government and politics for the newspaper. He has got the Ramnath Goenka Journalism award for Excellence in Journalism ‘2016. He got this award for his coverage of the Holey Bakery attack in Dhaka and its aftermath. He also got the IIMCAA Award for the Journalist of the Year, 2022, (Jury’s special mention) for his coverage of the fall of Kabul in August 2021 — he was one of the few Indian journalists in Kabul and the only mainstream newspaper to have covered the Taliban’s capture of power in mid-August, 2021. ... Read More
