Congress MP from Kerala Shashi Tharoor , in a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, questioned the government’s decision to charge the expatriates air fare to bring them back home from the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region, and asked the government to use the PM CARES Fund instead.
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In the letter, Mr Tharoor also flagged the difficulties faced by Indian citizens in submitting COVID-19 test results and asked the government to “rethink the existing definitions for individuals meriting priority evacuations”.
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While appreciating the government for “finally deciding to address the plight of our stranded pravasis”, he said the decision to charge air fare was particularly concerning. Some reports said the expatriates will have to pay Rs 30,000-40,000 in air fares. There was a strong case for the government to reconsider its position especially for the blue collar workers, those who have been laid off and were now without employment or those with limited resources, he said.
‘Severe financial strain’
“The majority of our expatriate population in the GCC for instance fall into one of these three categories and the government’s decision to charge them would cause a severe financial strain that many can ill afford to bear,” Mr. Tharoor wrote.
Most of the individuals would also had the added strain of sending in their limited income to support their families during the ongoing lockdown, leaving them with little money to spare. “Given these considerations, I would like to urge the government to strongly reconsider the existing decision and come up with a suitable alternative, particularly catering to our more financially vulnerable expatriates,” he said.
Three options
The government could explore one of the three options, allocating funds from the PM CARES corpus or the Indian Community Welfare Fund maintained by the embassies or work out a suitable formula for cost-sharing with the State governments, he stated.
There were practical difficulties in submitting COVID-19 results to register with the respective local embassies. There were transport related challenges to travel to a public healthcare and tests in private labs were prohibitively expensive. The embassies should facilitate testing or the expatriates should be quarantined on arrival, he noted.
Mr. Tharoor also urged the government to rethink the existing definitions for individuals meriting priority evacuations to include those with mental or physical disabilities along with one caregiver. As also pregnant women who were seven months or more pregnant since no regular commercial aircraft would allow them to fly in their advanced state of pregnancy.
