A large group of Indian medical students stranded in Bangladesh because of the lockdown will be evacuated shortly in a first special flight from Dhaka. The 167 students hailing from Kashmir are enrolled in medical schools in Dhaka and were stuck after India declared the lockdown on March 24.
The special Air India flight will leave at 11 a.m. on Friday from Dhaka’s Shahjalal International Airport and will reach Srinagar by afternoon. Bangladesh has around 550 medical students from Kashmir who study in various government and private medical colleges in Dhaka and Mymensingh. 67 medical students had tried to leave Bangladesh through the Benapole-Petrapole crossing in West Bengal on March 24 but were not allowed to enter as India had sealed all land borders with neighbouring countries to fight the novel coronavirus.
India and Bangladesh have been in a state of lockdown to fight the COVID-19 pandemic and sources among the students said that they were looked after by the medical schools even though the institutes had ordered students to return home to deal with the crisis. An Indian student from a private medical school in Mymensingh informed that other evacuation flights are being planned to airlift the rest of the group to Kashmir.
The flights are part of India’s regional and global evacuation operation, which began on Thursday evening with the departure of an aircraft from the United Arab Emirates for Kerala.
