Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan has sought Prime Minister’s help to organise flights to Dubai so that Keralites working in the UAE but stranded here due to the lockdown can go back and resume work.
This follows a decision by the UAE government to allow expatriates with residence visa to come back in the wake of a perceptible improvement in the COVID situation in the Gulf country. But India has not yet resumed international flights, although domestic flights have started operations.
At one stage, the virus outbreak in Dubai and Abu Dhabi had appeared to spiral out of control, but the situation has greatly improved of late as both the Emirates have come out of most COVID restrictions, except personal protection protocols.
Vijayan wrote to the Prime Minister, pointing out that many people from the state are waiting to get back to work in Dubai and other Gulf regions. “Considering this, a direction may be issued to the Civil Aviation Ministry to resume the flight services to Dubai," Vijayan said.
Vijayan’s new request comes even as the Centre has declined to grant his appeal to not to let anyone board evacuation flights without a COVID-negative certificate in view of the risk of some of the passengers carrying the virus, putting additional burden on the state’s COVID defence, which is already under strain.
When the Kerala expatriate community as well as opposition parties in the state opposed the move on the plea that many of the Gulf countries do not have the facility for conducting such tests for the purpose of certification, Pinarayi had suggested that his government was ready to supply kits for TrueNat test, which can determine if anyone is suffering from the disease.
But the Centre has turned down the request on the ground that the test is not approved by many of the Gulf countries and there are serious logistics issues. The Kerala government had asked the Centre to instruct the Indian embassies and diplomatic missions to hold such tests and issue the certificate.
The Centre is also understood to have turned down the request to organise special flights to bring Covid patients separately. Kerala’s contention was that if the infected persons travel in the same flight along with other passengers, there was a great risk of the others getting infected.
Embassies have notified Kerala’s requirement of Covid-negative certificate with effect from June 25, but with no effective mechanism in place to hold tests and issue such certificates, passengers waiting to be evacuated are facing uncertainty.
The certificate has become a hot political issue in the state, with the opposition parties accusing the government of indifference to the plight of Keralites stranded in Gulf countries without job and the means for daily necessities.
