KOCHI: In one of the largest COVID 19-related repatriations from West Asia, the Saudi Arabia-based Expertise Contracting Company has started operating 12 chartered flights to safely repatriate over 2000 of its employees - 1,600 of them Indians - to their various home countries in the Indian subcontinent.
Six flights have already reached India -- Chennai and Hyderabad on Friday (Jun 5) and Ahmedabad and Delhi on Jun 6 and Mangalore and Chennai on Jun 7.
The company, which drew out a meticulous plan to execute the difficult task, had finally received permissions for arranging nine specially-chartered flights to India (Delhi, Mangalore, Chennai, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad) and to three of the neighbouring countries. As per the schedule, the remaining flights are on June 10 (Kochi) and June 11 (Mangalore).
The operations will conclude on June 11.
The flights, chartered from Gulf Air and being operated from the city of Dammam in KSA, also include the ones covering three other neighbouring countries.
K S Shaikh, director, Expertise Contracting Company, said the 20-year-old Expertise group, one of the largest conglomerates in the GCC operating in petrochemical and heavy equipment sectors, has got more than 10,000 employees and their family members in the Gulf, mainly in Jubail, home to the largest industrial city in the world. Of these, the company has chosen over 2,000 employees for the COVID-related repatriations considering various emergencies.
During the initial lockdown days of the pandemic, the borders of most of the countries in the world were shut down and no country was allowing any humans to either enter or leave the respective countries, adding enormous stress to the migrant populations across the world, especially in the Gulf.
Shaikh said a few of the family members of Expertise employees were pregnant or in need of medical care.
"Many of the employees above 50 years of age were also worried about their own health prospects during the COVID-19 threat and we thought it was our duty to ensure the safe arrival of them to their home countries, which made us plan and operate these chartered flights," he said.
This has been the biggest and largest repatriation mission undertaken by any private company in the entire West Asia, which includes the cost of the air travel and the quarantine expenses of the passengers and airline crew in the respective countries, all borne by Expertise Contracting Company.