Additional Vande Bharat Mission flights announced

Our Correspondent

India’s Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) has said that it will operate 120 additional flights in Phase IV of its repatriation mission Vande Bharat until July 31. According to Anurag Srivastava, MEA Spokesperson, the additional flights will be from GCC countries, Malaysia, Singapore, the United Kingdom, Europe, Kyrgyzstan, and Ukraine.

“With this augmentation, this phase from July 15 till the end of this month now has 751 international flights, catering to 34 airports in India,” he said. This will help the continuing demand for repatriation of Indians from these countries in view of the pandemic.

The international arrivals will be supplemented by feeder flights from international airports to domestic airports in different states, taking the total to 926 flights in the fourth phase. He said 687,467 Indian nationals have returned under the VBM so far.

Srivastava added that ‘air bubbles’ with several countries, in addition to the ongoing ones, are under negotiation. These will include some countries in the GCC region. “This would help movement of people between these countries and India till international air travel is restored to normalcy.”

Air bubbles are flights outside of scheduled commercial services, which are being negotiated by India the world over in view of the extraordinary circumstances created by COVID-19. The spokesperson hinted that there may be no VBM Phase V as he used the words “if any” about the next phase.

This is because a vast majority of Indian citizens, who had registered their interest with Indian embassies across the world in 137 countries, would have returned home on repatriation flights by July 31.