Vande Bharat Mission: A tale of chaos and calm for the stranded

“We were brought back and it was a major history that I will remember but…,” trailed off 32-year-old Sandeep (*name and age changed), who was on the first repatriation flight to Bengaluru from London that landed on May 11 with 323 stranded Indians under the Government of India’s Vande Bharat Mission.

A Bengaluru resident, Sandeep had relocated to the UK after landing an engineer’s job in February this year. Little did he know what 2020 had in store for him. Two months into his job, he was laid off. With the novel coronavirus rearing its ugly head, he was stuck in a foreign country, desperate to return to his homeland.

Sandeep registered with the High Commission of India in the UK as soon as they sent out a tweet with the registration form, which was a faint indication of the beginning of the repatriation process.

Luckily, he got a mail confirming that he had been shortlisted to fly back on the May 10 flight to Bengaluru and asking him if he was willing to fly. This was supposed to be followed by a phone call from Air India to book the flight ticket. All he received one day before the flight was a payment link that was going to expire in 30 minutes.

“I didn’t know if I was making the right payment or if the link was authentic. I mailed and called Air India to ask them if the payment link was legit. They never responded,” said Sandeep.

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He went ahead and decided to grab the best chance to get back home by completing the payment. After not receiving a confirmation mail or an e-ticket from Air India, he set out for the airport anyway and received the e-ticket one hour before the flight after standing in a queue for nearly four hours at the airport.

“I don’t know if we should accept what we have or bring up whatever is missing as an issue in this situation," said Sandeep. "When I talk about this, I always think about the people who aren’t even getting food outside."

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Hyderabad’s Naveen Kumar and his six-month pregnant wife, however, weren’t as lucky as Sandeep. Kumar, an engineer who had been working in the UK since 2018, and his wife were eyeing the May 11 flight to Hyderabad from London’s Heathrow Airport. Kumar received a mail from the High Commission on May 10 stating that his wife had been shortlisted.

When the High Commission called to confirm his wife’s willingness to travel, he put forth his apprehensions about her travelling alone and told them that she would travel if he was allowed to travel with her.

“I was told that they would write down the comments and then someone else from the High Commission would contact me, which they did, about 20 minutes after the first call,” said Kumar.

It was a slight breather for the couple when, on the second call, Kumar was assured that he would also get a confirmation mail and call from Air India. Kumar did get a call from Air India but this, to their surprise, was only to confirm his wife’s ticket and he was asked to contact the High Commission to resolve his request for a ticket. His name, he was told, wasn’t on the list.

“I tried calling the Air India numbers listed in the email that I’d received, dropped multiple mails and tried calling the High Commission as well but didn’t get a proper response. I had cancelled my wife’s medical appointment, had spoken to my landlord about leaving for India after the High Commission’s assurance and had to request the hospital to not cancel it. This was the time she could travel without any complications. Even if we get to travel in the next two to three weeks, she’ll first have to wait for the doctor’s green signal,” a dejected Kumar said.

Communication snags, payment woes haunt hopes

Like Kumar, a handful of others faced communication snags, be it with the High Commission or with Air India.

Tabish Ghafoor, a software engineer, who runs a Twitter handle called ‘Indians in UK’ and a Telegram channel by the same name with 1,000-odd members is trying to help out the ones looking to fly back by creating a one-stop source for information related to the repatriation process, flights and other details.

He said the problem started right when the High Commission issued the Google Form for registration.

“People didn’t know that the particular Google Form was for repatriation because it wasn’t made very clear since the Central Government in India had also not announced formally that the repatriation would happen (the announcement came on May 5)," said Ghafoor. "The forms were changed a couple of times to include additional fields and people were unsure about their entries being submitted correctly or if they’d missed anything because new fields like emergency/priority reasons (bereavement, pregnancy, visa expiration, stranded tourist, visa categories etc.) had been added later to the same form. So they feared that if they hadn’t filled in the latest form correctly, they might not get shortlisted.”

The High Commission, Ghafoor said, would then reach out to the shortlisted/waitlisted passengers, sifting on the basis of priority – the most vulnerable ones first - through mails and/or calls to confirm their willingness to fly.

Next comes the phone call from Air India to verify the passengers’ details and walk them through the ticket payment process. For the first flight from London to Mumbai on May 9, the payment happened over a phone call with an Air India representative, who would ask the passenger to provide their card details.

Ghafoor said that many people weren’t sure about sharing card details over a call and it was coupled with the fear that not sharing the info would cause them to lose their seats.

After the queries started pouring in, the High Commission sent out emails to the shortlisted passengers explaining the verification process along with a list of phone numbers that they would get a call from and other identifiers. The High Commission also put out a tweet with details on how to identify if the emails were genuine.

The process was changed from the second flight onwards – the Bengaluru flight on May 10 – where people were sent a payment link that was active for 30 minutes after which it expired.

This came with its own set of issues because many started reporting payment failures. Another issue was the timing of the payment link that was generally sent one day prior to the flight in the initial flights, and confirmed tickets were sent within an average of six hours after the payment with no prior payment confirmation, leaving very little room for clarifications when faced with errors.

Prashant Mhatre, an IT professional, wanted to return to take care of his 75-year-old mother living alone in the heart of COVID-19-plagued Mumbai.

Mhatre was one of those who had to go through the ordeal of multiple failed payments and communication lags as he didn’t even receive a call from Air India about the flight after the High Commission email indicating that he had been waitlisted. He directly received an email with the payment link, again, a day before the flight, which kept failing.

“Some people in the group (Indians in UK) said that the payment might go through with an Indian card. I then asked some of my friends in India to try with their cards on the off chance that it might work but it didn’t,” said Mhatre.

One sleepless night and several failed attempts to get through to Air India later, Mhatre decided to pack and drive down to the airport anyway. It was only after the Air India airport manager got involved that he was able to make the payment and get on the flight to Mumbai.

However, just like the payment method was updated to clear the air, the time given to passengers in terms of when the payment links were sent seemed to be improving with the later flights, even as the glitches on the technical and communication fronts persisted.

Vishal Ramakrishnan, a Chennai-based musician, received the payment link two days prior to the flight to Chennai on May 14 but still faced payment issues and raised doubts about the communication efficiency.

“Most communication was through Twitter and the High Commission sent emails only after the passenger was shortlisted," said Ramakrishnan. "They could have instead sent emails to the ones who had registered as no registration confirmation made it confusing and not everyone is on Twitter. Even the Tamil Nadu government had a proper page. If it can be done at the state level, I’m pretty sure it can be done at the national level.”

The payment gateway, he said, was terrible. "When I tried using my UK credit card, it wouldn’t work; there was no option to allow internet banking using the local UK banks," he said. "Then when I tried to use my UK debit card, they charged me 51,750 pounds instead of rupees, it couldn’t be converted! Then my transaction failed. I tried with my Indian debit and credit card and the transaction failed again.”

With only one option – internet banking – left and almost done with the 30-minute window, Ramakrishnan gave it another shot and finally was able to book the ticket.

On a normal day, from the embassy’s perspective, they run with limited staff because of fewer queries coming in but with the repatriation process, there are a lot of people trying to reach out to them, according to Ghafoor. “They must be flooded with the sheer volume of calls/emails handling one flight daily with no breathing space. I can imagine how understaffed and overwhelmed they must be feeling with the queries,” he said.

Ghafoor added that the high commission is trying its best to streamline – first by shifting from call-based payment for the ticket to a payment link to moving away from the one email id that they had for everything and issuing different email ids for different locations.

He also said that they had started asking people to use specific subject lines for specific issues, which might help them in categorising emails. For instance, if the passengers are willing to fly after getting shortlisted, they’ve been asked to append ‘yes’ at the end of the subject line, which could help in sorting the emails.

Long-awaited whiff of home soil

Shefali Rai, a 26-year-old Bengaluru resident who was pursuing her Master's in Environmental Design Architecture in the UK – was one of the 323 stranded Indians brought to Bengaluru by the national carrier on May 11.

Rai said that there was an announcement made about no social distancing norms inside the flight before they boarded but before they got on and after landing at KIA airport, they tried to maintain it as much as possible. The passengers were provided with a face shield, mask, sanitiser pouches and a food packet.

“Until we got on the flight, the situation was a little tense but after getting off it, it was quite calm. I feel they’re doing an incredible job. Once we got off the flight, they had everything under control. Just the payment link and the communication was a bit off,” said Rai.

Upon arrival, the passengers, Rai said, were divided into batches of 20 and were asked to proceed for the thermal screening and other health check-ups before heading for immigration and baggage collection.

She said that there were three counters that were maintained – one for the 14-day quarantine hotels, another had a doctor who was guiding people with health apps like Aarogya Setu and the third with SIM cards for the ones who didn’t have an Indian SIM card.

The hotel rooms - the budget rooms were Rs 1,200 a night, 3-star rooms were Rs 1,850 and 5-star rooms were Rs 4,100 (three meals a day included in 3-star and 5-star) - were assigned at the airport itself and BMTC buses were arranged to take passengers to their respective hotels.

Everything was perfectly organised, said Rai. At the hotels, there were daily check-ups by a doctor who visited twice a day. Hygiene was maintained very well inside the 3-star hotel in Whitefield that Rai had chosen, with sanitisers readily available everywhere and staff wearing gloves and masks.

On the flight ticket fare and the hotel prices, Rai said, “Since each person has his own personal burden of flight and quarantine facility and it's during an unanticipated burden to get home, that’s the only reason that I felt that the whole cost of coming back was turning out to be a little expensive as against a normal situation but we’re not in a normal situation.”

The government had launched the 'Vande Bharat Mission' on May 7 to repatriate Indians from different parts of the world who were stranded due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Under phase one of the mission, between May 7 and May 14, the government evacuated a total of 12,000 Indians from the Gulf, the US, the UK, Philippines, Bangladesh, Malaysia and the Maldives by operating a total of 64 Air India and Air India Express flights.

Phase two of the mega evacuation mission is expected to bring back over 32,000 stranded Indians from 31 countries on 149 flights between May 16 and May 22.