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“Considering the prevailing situation in the UK, government of India has decided that all flights originating from UK to India to be suspended till December 31,” the Ministry of Civil Aviation said in a tweet. Flights from the UK will be allowed to land here till 23.59 on December 22. Officials said that the flight suspension was both ways.
India joins a growing number of nations including Germany, Italy, Belgium, Ireland, Turkey and Canada that have suspended UK flights. The ban comes as a new strain of the Coronavirus which is 70 per cent more transmissible has come up in the UK.
The decision to ban the flights was based on the inputs received from the Joint Monitoring Group (JMG) headed by the Director-General of Health Services and the Vaccine Task Force headed by the Principal Scientific Advisor and Member (Health) Niti Aayog.
Joint Monitoring Group recommendations
The JMG has recommended that passengers arriving from the UK on all international transit flights should be subjected to mandatory RT-PCR tests on arrival at the airport. Those who are found positive must be sent for institutional quarantine/isolation and those found negative should be advised to isolate themselves at home for seven days, a communication from Secretary, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare states.
The letter points out that India has been seeing a sustained decrease in the number of fresh Covid-19 cases for over two and a half months, accompanied by a decline in the number of deaths. “In this scenario, any interjection of a SARS-CoV-2 variant virus through passengers with air travel history could pose critical risks for pandemic management in India,” the Secretary, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare states.
The move will affect Vistara and Air India on the Indian side and British Airways and Virgin Atlantic on the UK side as they are operating flights between India and the UK. Vistara is currently operating five times a week to London.
The suspension comes on the day that LocalCircles, a Community Social Media platform released a report based on 202 districts in India which said that 50 per cent of the participants wanting bubble flights suspended from countries which had been impacted by the new Coronavirus variant. The report is based on responses from over 7,000 participants.
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