India’s coronavirus situation is still far from being controlled. On Sunday night, India not only overtook Russia to become the country with third highest number of confirmed Covid-19 cases, by Monday evening it even crossed 7 lakh mark with the 3,827 new cases reported, taking the total number of cases in the country to 7,01,240. India is just behind only the US and Brazil. The rapid rise in number of Covid-19 cases in India could definitely impact India’s plans to restart international operations. India currently has called off international operations of commercial flights till July 31 but the rise in numbers are giving different indications.
In India currently international air travel is restricted to repatriation missions being flown by Indian as well as foreign carriers. On Sunday the flight operations of its domestic passengers were stopped to West Bengal as the state sought ban on domestic flights from airports like Mumbai, Nagpur, Pune, Ahmedabad, Delhi and Chennai. following the request from the state the Ministry of Civil Aviation suspended flights from these airports to Kolkata for a period of two weeks between July 6-19.
The situation in states like Telangana and Karnataka are also worsening as on Sunday, Karnataka reported 1,925 fresh cases, while Telangana recorded 1,590 new cases. Both these states now have more than 23,000 cases each. In Telangana, about 9,500 fresh cases were recorded and Karnataka recorded over 10,000 fresh cases in the past week.
For India, the resumption of international flights depends mainly on the destination countries allowing Indian citizens to enter their borders as the European Union also excluded India from the list of the countries for which it is opening its borders.