Sabir Hussain/New Delhi

The government’s efforts to step up evacuation from Ukraine have raised hopes of a large number of Indians, mostly students still stranded in that country.

On Monday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi deputed four ministers to neighbouring countries of Ukraine to coordinate the evacuation of stranded Indians amid ongoing Russian military operations in Ukraine.

Minister of Civil Aviation Jyotiraditya Scindia will be overseeing evacuation operations of stranded Indians in Romania and Moldova, while Minister of Law Kiren Rijiju will be visiting Slovakia.

Minister of Petroleum and Natural Gas Hardeep Singh Puri will be overlooking operations in Hungary, and Minister of State in the Ministry of Road Transport Gen (Retd) VK Singh will manage evacuations in Poland.

Ravi Koul, an education consultant in the national capital, welcomed the government’s latest move.

“It is good that the Prime Minister deputed four ministers to coordinate the evacuation process. On the ground, that needs to be translated into seamless coordination to bring back Indians as soon as possible,” he said.

He acknowledged that the evacuation process is difficult because of the war and size of Ukraine which makes a journey from one place to another a dangerous proposition.

“For example, if students have to travel from Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine to the western part of the country there is the risk because of the fighting in Ukraine’s east. A 1000-km ride through a war zone is simply not safe. Some of the Indian students in Kharkiv are taking shelters in bunkers and are running low on food,” Koul said.

While the Indian embassy in Kyiv in an advisory on Monday morning asked students to head for the railway station to board trains for western Ukraine, many students complained that it was difficult to reach the station in the absence of transport.

“The embassy can’t help on its own. There is a security threat and the government can’t be present everywhere and can’t do everything,” he said.

But he underlined that there is a need for better coordination at the borders to end the chaos, particularly at the Polish border, and suggested opening separate counters for Indians.

“There is a need for proper coordination and bridging information gap. Separate counters for Indians should be opened at these borders to ensure that they cross over in reasonable time instead of waiting for long hours in cold weather,” Koul said.

He said stranded students told him that there was no Indian official at the Polish border and the numbers that the Indian embassy in Warsaw had mentioned in an advisory were not working.

The Polish border is close to Lviv where many Indian students were studying. 

He pointed out that the evacuation through the Romanian border has been more efficient but wondered why only Bucharest and Budapest were designated as staging points for the evacuation flights when Indians were crossing into Hungary, Romania, Poland, and Slovakia. Many have even crossed into Moldova.

“The government has done what it had to do. I only hope the mental torture of the students and their parents ends soon,” Koul said.