India sends relief materials to Bangladesh Rohingya camps

Packs contain food grains, cooking oil, soap and mosquito nets

Indian aid being being handed over to officials in Bangladesh.

Three government departments have collaborated in the last 48 hours to dispatch one of the largest relief consignments to southeast Bangladesh for the refugees streaming in from violence-hit Myanmar.

More than a hundred metric tonnes of relief material have already been dispatched, said a senior official of National Agricultural Cooperative Marketing Federation of India Ltd (NAFED).

Officials of the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), the Indian Air Force (IAF) and NAFED are working round the clock to dispatch food materials, mosquito nets and soap to the camps.

“We have so far dispatched 110 metric tonnes of material marked for 8,000 families. We expect to reach about 70,000 families,” said Rohit Jaiman, a senior official of NAFED in Delhi.

Family packs

Food grains, pulses, sugar, salt, cooking oil, tea, milk powder, biscuits and noodles were put together in jute bags, with ‘Gift from People of India’ stitched on it. Each small jute pack contains food grains, besides soaps and a mosquito net.

“The first two consignments of 22,000 jute bags were supplied from Kolkata,” the MEA official said.

A C-17 aircraft, the IAF’s transport workhorse, carried the relief material to southeast Bangladesh, where reportedly more than one hundred thousand Rohingya refugees have arrived since the fresh spell of violence broke out on August 25.

“But that is the position. We would like Bangladesh to deal with the situation and we can provide relief on the basis of the request of the Bangladesh government as at least half a dozen countries are doing,” a senior central government official said.