Air India will operate additional flights as part of the Vande Bharat mission to repatriate Indians from foreign nations, Union Civil Aviation Minister Hardeep Singh Puri tweeted on Friday, 29 May.
According to Puri, the state carrier will operate flights for Delhi-Auckland on 4 June, Delhi-Chicago and Delhi-Stockholm on 5 June, Delhi to New York, Frankfurt and Seoul on 6 June and Mumbai to London and Newark on 6 June.
Bookings for these flights will start at 11 pm on 30 May, Puri said.
The government on had Thursday, 28 May, said that it has so far evacuated over 45,000 Indian nationals stranded abroad due to the coronavirus pandemic and the subsequent lockdown.
The official spokesperson of the Ministry of External Affairs, Anurag Srivastava, revealed in a virtual media briefing that of the 45,216 Indians who have returned, 8,069 are migrant workers, 7,656 students and 5,107 professionals.
Around 5,000 Indians have returned through the land border immigration checkpoints from Nepal and Bangladesh. So far, 3,08,200 persons have registered their request with the Indian missions abroad for repatriation to India on compelling grounds.
On Tuesday, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar had a detailed review meeting with all the stakeholders. The focus of the meeting was to ramp up the scale of the VBM and to enhance its efficiency.
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