147 medical students land in Nagpur from Kyrgyzstan

Nagpur: The second Vande Bharat flight to Nagpur landed at 11pm on Saturday bringing 147 medical students from Bishkek — the capital of Kyrgyzstan. Seventy-three on board were from Maharashtra and rest from Chhattisgarh.
Chhattisgarh government had arranged buses to take the students home. The passengers in one of the vehicles included six migrant workers and a child from the state.They had reached Nagpur from Khandali village in Solapur district after hiring vehicles, and ran out of money after that. Hailing from Janjgir-Champa in Chhattisgarh, over 1,000km from Solapur, they worked as farm hands.
The group had five women, one with a child, and a man underpaid and hassled due to the lockdown. The group had hired vehicles to reach home. The money they had could bring them only up to Nagpur. At Nagpur, they managed to search the district collector’s office from where arrangement was made for their travel in the buses carrying Vande Bharat passengers.
In the flight, there were five students from Nagpur among the 73 from Maharashtra. TOI came across students from Jalna, Buldhana and Akola districts too.
Those from Nagpur were taken to hotel quarantine facilities and rest went to their respective districts in their private vehicles. “On reaching there, they are supposed to report at the collector’s office in their district, from where they will be sent to quarantine centres,” said a district collectorate officer on duty at the airport.
“The process was hassle-free. Urgencies like health issues or problems at home were considered for prioritizing the travel. There was no such case among students from Maharashtra so I easily got the ticket,” said Bhushan Patil from Buldhana.
The students praised facilities at Bishkek even as some of them complained of the apathy at the Indian embassy. “The guards and other staffers were rude,” said one of them. Yet, most of them denied having faced any hassles during the stay at Kyrgyzstan.
The workers waiting in the bus, however, remained a harried lot. “The women were paid Rs5,500 a month and I got Rs8,000. Things had got costlier due to the lockdown, and the wages were hardly enough to carry on,” said Sanjeet Kumar, the only male member in the group. “There are little means of livelihood in villages so we had to move out,” said Kavita, another group member.
“We pooled in money and first reached Pune where we were told that there was no train to Chhattisgarh, so we came back to Solapur. From there, we reached Nagpur in two vehicles and around Rs12,000 was spent in paying the fare,” said Sanjeet. On Sunday when TOI inquired, the workers had reached their homes.
Akash Jawale, a social worker helping the students at the city airport, said even his sister was there at Bishkek. He hoped she may be back in the subsequent flights, as he asked one of her classmates about her return.