bout de papier, Vol. 31, No. 2 (2021), pp. 12–13
… BY MID-MARCH, THE SITUATION in India and the global pandemic had become increasingly serious. Most of the Canada-Based Staff and their dependents were evacuated on what would be the last commercial flights to leave India. March 22 was a national curfew day in Delhi. Before the day ended, a nationwide lockdown was announced. This lockdown would last until the end of May.
In Delhi, there are some pleasant aspects to the lockdown … there are no cars, buses, taxis or auto-rickshaws on the streets of Delhi. The metro and the train system is shut down. For those of you who have been posted here, this is an incomprehensible image, I know. Our mission drivers have never driven in empty streets — it took them some time to become comfortable with it.
There are very few people on the streets of Delhi and no more families living in the streets, parks and sheltering under the overpasses of the city. Again, an apocalyptic image of emptiness. The lockdown prompted an exodus of millions of day labourers from the large cities — with no work and no wages, and no public transport, they had no choice but to begin walking to their home villages several hundred kilometres away. It took the government a few days to react — they rounded them up and returned them to the cities to stop the potential spread of coronavirus, but many are living in camps on the edges of mega cities. Trains would eventually be organized to take them home.
The street dogs have taken over Delhi. They sleep in the middle of the roads during the day because there is no traffic. I can hear packs of dogs howling and barking at night because there is no traffic noise to muffle the sound. At the empty airport in the middle of the night, the sound of barking reverberates through the empty terminals and buildings. I even saw a cow in the median on the way to the airport the other evening. During the day it is so quiet that all you can hear is the sound of birds. For the first time in decades, the air in Delhi is clean (well, relatively clean. It is what a summer day in Toronto would be registering at, under 100 on the Air Quality Index.) During the last two weeks of March and early April when the temperatures were still pleasant, I would actually open the windows in my apartment during the mornings for a bit of fresh air. Never imagined being able to do that while on posting here!
Why this reference to airports at night and empty terminal buildings, you might ask? All commercial flights into and out of India are suspended. But the Government of Canada has embarked on what is now the largest repatriation of its citizens since WWII, with India accounting for an exercise of unimagined magnitude, 11,000 people (and counting) over 36 flights (and counting). There are 30-some Canada-Based Officers who remained at the mission and are all part of our Emergency Response Team, working in tandem with our small group of seven immigration officers in Delhi and three evacuated colleagues in Canada who are the operations team for this consular repatriation effort. We have a small team going out to the airport for the flights departing Delhi because there may be consular issues or passengers not properly ticketed or documented with visas despite our hard work going through each name on the flight manifests. For flights departing from other cities in India, our Consuls General have been assisting at the airports, and we follow the process remotely through groups set up on WhatsApp. This has also meant, however, that the operations team has been working non-stop since the lockdown began, averaging 14-16 hour days, without much of a break.
Our mission has negotiated and organized three different phases of special flights — a charter-commercial with Air India to London Heathrow and then onwards with Air Canada using specific travel agents for bookings; a more commercial model with Qatar Airways via Doha to Montreal, where passengers have to book themselves online; and now a charter model using Qatar via Doha to either Toronto or Vancouver and booking through a travel agent. We also did a flight in collaboration with our Australian colleagues to evacuate stranded Canadians in Nepal and have been able to put Canadians in more remote areas of India on flights operated by the British or French. These flights are all going empty in one direction, so the price is high, between $2,500—3,000 per passenger, which means we have a team approving some 1,500 emergency transportation loans. We spent many late nights at the office doing online bookings on behalf of passengers holding transportation loans with our mission acquisition cards since there was no time to allow for funds to be transferred into bank accounts. The team here is responsible for organizing ground transportation approvals from the government for each passenger as, due to the lockdown, curfew passes are needed to travel to the airport. We have done geomatic surveys to determine where Canadians in India are physically located, so that we could better plan which airports to use for our flights. And we work with many, many spreadsheets to track all the details — those holding transportation loans, vulnerable passengers referred by MPs or the Minister’s Office — to build passenger manifests for each flight.
Who are our stranded Canadians in India? There were of course Canadian tourists in India who were stranded when commercial flights were suspended, as backpackers or visiting over March break holidays or those at yoga retreats. But the vast majority are Indo- Canadians, visiting family for several weeks. And then there is the snowbird population, mostly in the Punjab, retirees who spend six months of each year during the Canadian winter back in India. With the lockdown now at two months, most people are anxious to return home. The weather is very hot, they are running out of medications, pregnancies are progressing, families, jobs are waiting in Canada. The majority of our flights are from Amritsar (the Punjab) and average 40% senior citizens on each load. The oldest person we have carried so far was 106! The airports in India are amazing with their wheelchair brigades ready to take passengers from their vehicles, through the check-in process and all the way to the plane. The long lines of passengers in wheelchairs waiting to board are unique to this country. My favourite task has been assigning business class seating on these flights. While there is no real business class experience as such on our charter flights, I take great pleasure in putting the oldest and most infirm passengers into the more comfortable seats.
With this consular operation now going much longer than originally planned, we set up a mirror team in Ottawa at Global Affairs, who continue all our tasks during Delhi night-time hours. We wish we had thought of this much earlier in the crisis, but of course during a crisis you just try to put out fires and get things done, one day at a time. With this mirror team, we can now plan for mandated rest periods, but a solid week off won’t happen until this operation is finished with the last flight on May 21. We are managing a day off here and there, but I must admit that I sometimes fantasize about having to self-isolate for 14 days with nothing to do …
Postscript
eight-week blur where the days blended into one another, with each morning feeling like the movie Groundhog Day — wash, rinse, repeat.
Being part of this consular repatriation flight operation during lockdown conditions was both a privilege and a feat of endurance, as the members of the Emergency Response Team – Operations put in incredibly long hours over a sustained period to fill 40 flights with 11,695 Canadians/PRs repatriated from India.
Under the leadership of our High Commissioner, Nadir Patel, and our Operations Chief, Christopher Kerr (who put aside his IRCC Area Director and Program Manager duties for the duration of this repatriation operation), the entire India network across all government programs worked together to pull off this amazing achievement, to support the Canadian community, and to keep information flowing to and from Ottawa.
Having a large High Commission compound in Delhi made our daily lives easier and this large-scale operation easier to run. But it also meant that we needed local staff and contractors to continue to come into work during this lockdown period to be on site to guard entrances, to ensure the physical plant was kept running, to drive us to and from our staff quarters or the airport in the wee hours of the morning or late at night. and to operate the club restaurant so that those working 16-18 hour days did not have to worry about shopping for groceries when everything was closed. never mind finding time to prepare meals We had about a dozen locally-engaged staff reporting in, many on motorcycles which had an easier time getting through road blocks and curfews, to assist on consular cases or help with answering phones and emails (25.000 by early May alone’).
The Canadian staff who remained in Delhi, as well as in our consulates in Mumbai, Bangalore and Chandigarh. did so as members of Emergency Response Teams Many worked during this difficult time while separated from their spouses and children, who had been evacuated to Canada. That separation would last until early September in the case of Delhi, when dependents and some of our evacuated colleagues were permitted to return The situations in Mumbai, Bangalore and Chandigarh took longer to resolve and they remain at critical service levels only.
After this initial series of Government of Canada special flights during lockdown, repatriation from India continued until the end of July on mission-assisted flights, where the travellers could largely make their own bookings The final tally was 27,688 repatriated individuals from India and 381 repatriated individuals from Nepal.
Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 31, No. 2 (2021), pp. 12–13. Read the rest of this issue →
