ERNAKULAM/NEW DELHI : India on Thursday brought back the first lot of evacuees from among an estimated 15,000 stranded in 13 countries because of the lockdown imposed to battle covid-19.
The first batch of evacuees, in two of the 64 flights slated for this week as part of an evacuation plan codenamed Vande Bharat, landed in Kerala on Thursday.
The evacuation could see 200,000-300,000 people return from countries such as the US, UK, West Asia, and Singapore. It is billed as the world’s largest evacuation exercise and is set to be larger in scale than even the evacuation of 177,000 Indians from Iraq and Kuwait in the 1990s.