Indian Expats repatriation to begin May 7 |
India will begin the repatriation of thousands of Indians stranded abroad from the 7th of May. The exercise, billed to be the largest repatriation exercise to bring civilians home, will begin from Gulf countries where 70 percent of non-resident Indians live. Government officials said on Monday that the first phase would cover as many as 1 million 900 thousand people. The repatriation exercise will start from the United Arab Emirates, home to 3.4 million Indians, and move next to Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. The facility, extended to Indians in distress abroad, would be available on payment basis. According to foreign ministry officials, this exercise is going to be bigger than the evacuation of Indians from Kuwait during the 1990 Gulf war and a lot more complicated. The government won`t just use commercial airlines to run charter flights but also deploy its largest naval warships. Scores of foreign ministry officials have been compiling details of distressed Indian citizens abroad for days, prioritising the list of people who should be put on the initial round of flights. Prime Minister Narendra Modi had laid down the ground rule last month when he told the foreign ministry to give blue collar workers the first priority. In this decision, PM Modi had also accounted for the fact that many of the Indians staying in the gulf countries had lost their jobs.
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