‘Operation Kaveri’ is a rescue operation launched by the Government of India to evacuate Indian citizens who were stranded in:

Correct — D, Sudan. Fighting broke out in Khartoum on 15 April 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, and India announced Operation Kaveri on 24 April to bring out its nationals. The route ran overland to Port Sudan on the Red Sea coast, from where naval ships lifted people across to Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, and Air Force transports carried them onward to India; INS Sumedha was among the ships used and C-130J aircraft among the transports. One flight on the night of 27 and 28 April lifted 121 people from an unlit airstrip using night-vision equipment. By 5 May about 3,862 Indians had been evacuated. The Ministry of External Affairs ran the operation with the Navy and the Air Force, and the name follows the Indian practice of borrowing a river's name for a rescue mission.

• (a)Kuwait — Kuwait was 1990, and it carried no Sanskrit codename. After Iraq's invasion, Air India flew some 170,000 Indians home from Amman over about two months, an airlift that still holds the record as the largest civilian evacuation by air.
• (b)Ukraine — Ukraine was Operation Ganga, mounted in February and March 2022 after the Russian invasion. Students crossed into Poland, Romania, Hungary and Slovakia and were flown home from those borders.
• (c)Afghanistan — Afghanistan was Operation Devi Shakti, in August 2021, when Kabul fell to the Taliban and Indian nationals along with Afghan Sikhs and Hindus were flown out through Kabul and Dushanbe.

Evacuating citizens from a country in crisis is a consular responsibility of the Ministry of External Affairs, carried out with the armed forces and with civil aviation. The pattern is consistent across operations: an assembly point inside the country, a safe exit port or neighbouring state, and a shuttle home. What varies is the geography — a land border for Ukraine, an air bridge for Afghanistan, and for Sudan a sea crossing of the Red Sea because the airspace over Khartoum was closed and unsafe.

These named operations are among the most reliably asked current-affairs items in defence and security papers, and they are best learnt as a set rather than one at a time, since the examiner's options are always the other operations. The naming habit itself is a memory aid: Ganga for Ukraine, Kaveri for Sudan, Rahat for the Uttarakhand floods of 2013 and for Yemen in 2015, Devi Shakti for Afghanistan, Dost for the Turkey earthquake of February 2023. Sudan's civil war did not end with the evacuation — fighting between the army and the Rapid Support Forces has continued since 2023 and has displaced millions — so this is one of the few 2023 current-affairs items whose subject is still unresolved.

• The Sudan conflict began on 15 April 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces.
• Operation Kaveri ran from 24 April to 5 May 2023 and brought home about 3,862 Indians.
• Port Sudan was the exit point by sea and Jeddah the staging base for the onward air legs.
• INS Sumedha was among the naval ships deployed, and the Air Force flew C-130J transports.
• Indian evacuation operations are named by convention — Ganga for Ukraine, Devi Shakti for Afghanistan, Rahat for Yemen.

• Attaching the wrong river to the wrong country; Ganga and Kaveri are one year and one continent apart.
• Assuming every large Indian evacuation had a codename — the 1990 Kuwait airlift did not.
• Confusing Operation Kaveri with Operation Dost, the relief mission sent to Turkey and Syria earlier the same year.

Asked as a name-to-place match, with the other recent evacuations supplied as options, so the whole set has to be learnt together.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Operation Ganga was launched by the Government of India to evacuate Indian nationals from

  • (a)Sudan
  • (b)Ukraine
  • (c)Yemen
  • (d)Libya

  Answer(b) Ukraine — mounted in February and March 2022, with students leaving through the Polish, Romanian, Hungarian and Slovak borders.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  During Operation Kaveri, Indian nationals were first moved by sea from Port Sudan to

  • (a)Djibouti
  • (b)Muscat
  • (c)Jeddah
  • (d)Aden

  Answer(c) Jeddah — the Saudi port served as the staging base from which Air Force transports carried the evacuees on to India.