Mumbai : As firing ensued in Sana and Eden, the centers of conflict in war-torn Yemen, Jaggarao Parapati held his breath, praying for a miracle to happen to rescue him from the place. He was unaware of the provision of the Indian government to fly its citizens stranded in Yemen to safety.
This has been the plight of many Indians in Yemen. Parapati said, “We were not aware that we could travel back free of cost. That is why we missed the first flight and have landed only on Saturday.”
Parapati is among the Indians who landed first in Kochi and then in Mumbai on Saturday morning, aboard an Air India flight. He did not have any money or his passport on him, which he had submitted to his employers. Assuming he would need both to fly back to India, he was just buying time, unaware that the government was permitting Indians to board rescue planes with a mere photocopy of their passport.
Two other Indian Air Force cargo flights also landed in Mumbai on Friday night carrying 334 Indians stranded in Yemen.
Gouri Das Dan, Vice President of IOT Anwesha Engineering and Construction Ltd, an Indian company based out of Yemen, was aboard one of these Cargo planes. Out of the 250 Indians working in his company, only 50 managed to board this plane and 200 others had to be left behind. They are on their way back on the next available flight.
Dan said, “The Indian government helped not only Indians but Pakistani and Ethiopian nationals as well. Twelve of them were brought to the safety of Djibouti, a city outside the war zone, by the Indian navy ships”.
Neeladri Pitta, a native of Andhra Pradesh, who also landed in Mumbai on Saturday morning said all he recalls of his 7 month long stay in Yemen is the fear for his life that gripped him in the past few weeks.
Pitta was employed as a labourer at a power plant 400 km away from Sana. Yet, he said every time the fighting got worse, he would travel to the city and live in a lodge, lest the rebels bombard the power plant itself. Speaking exclusively to FPJ, he said, “We felt the city to be safer, even though the situation there was equally gruesome. I would wake up to bombardments every night, praying my building is not the next rogue target. There was no relief from the fear.”
Like Parapati, Pitta also did not have money or his passport and did not come to India sooner for lack of knowledge of the evacuation.
