Assam Flies Officials To Kota To Arrange Evacuation Of Stranded Students

The Assam government on Thursday sent a team of officials and police personnel to "facilitate" the evacuation of its students stranded in Kota following requests from families in the state and the government of Rajasthan.

To fast track the process, the team of officials and police personnel who would escort the students back were sent to Jaipur on a chartered aircraft, a Learjet 45 double engine plane. However, this chartered plane will not be used for the evacuation operation, government sources added.

Over 350 students from Assam who are stranded in Kota amid the nationwide COVID-19 lockdown would be brought back by road to Guwahati from Kota via Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. Officials who have been sent will organise the operation and police personnel will escort the students, official sources added.

While state government is only facilitating the evacuation of the students from Kota, their parents will pay for travel by road, official sources said.

The chartered flight has been used to "drop" the officials to Jaipur, to reduce the time of travel since Kota is over 2,000 km from Guwahati, a senior health department official added. The officials have already started to "expedite" the process, a top official said.

"Rajasthan Chief Minister (Ashok Gehlot) had requested to all other state government to take back the students stranded at Kota. Many states have already evacuated. We have been exploring the idea, but we are careful since there are many more people of Assam stranded in other places. Our chartered plane keeps flying to different destinations on urgent COVID operation to organize materials," Assam Health Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma told exclusively to NDTV.

With domestic aircraft grounded, limited cargo flights, the Learjet 45 chartered by Assam government from VSR Ventures Pvt Ltd has played a key role in Assam's preparations to tackle the COVID-19 outbreak.

This mid-size business jet produced by the Learjet Division of Bombardier Aerospace has been pressed into service ever since the lockdown began. It has been flying almost every day, even at night, on urgent COVID-19 operations.

"One day we ran out of our RNA extraction kits, we had to bring them from Kolkata, we could get it within hours because of this chartered flight. There was a COVID patient who had leukemia, co-morbidity. There was an urgent requirement to send an expert doctor to Silchar and we did this with the plane and many more such operations. Also, it was used widely to rush the samples for testing," Mr Sarma told NDTV.

The plane also has been extensively used to carry the minister and his team as his crisscrossed different parts of Assam in the past month.