Medical students of India were brought to India from Ukraine by Indian Government under which of the following operations ?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — B, Operation Ganga. When Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022, several thousand Indians — overwhelmingly students enrolled in Ukrainian medical universities — were stranded in a war zone whose airspace had been closed. India's response, launched on 26 February 2022 and run as its main phase until 11 March 2022, was named Operation Ganga. Because no aircraft could fly into Ukraine, the evacuation worked by land first: students were moved by road and rail to the western borders and crossed into five transit countries — Romania, Hungary, Poland, Moldova and Slovakia — from where they were flown home. The first evacuation flight reached New Delhi on 27 February 2022 carrying 249 nationals; in all, roughly 22,000 to 25,000 Indians were brought back, of whom just over 18,000 were students, along with 147 nationals of eighteen other countries. The airlift used Indian Air Force transports alongside six civil carriers — Air India, Air India Express, IndiGo, SpiceJet, Go First and AirAsia India — and four Union Ministers (Hardeep Singh Puri, Jyotiraditya Scindia, Kiren Rijiju and Gen. V. K. Singh) were sent to the transit countries as special envoys to coordinate the crossings. The exam was held on 12 June 2022, so this was a three-month-old event when candidates faced it.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) No Indian evacuation from Ukraine carried this name. India's overseas rescue missions are named individually for each crisis — Sukoon for Lebanon in 2006, Rahat for Yemen in 2015, the Vande Bharat Mission for the Covid-19 repatriation in 2020, Devi Shakti for Afghanistan in 2021 and Kaveri for Sudan in 2023 — and the 2022 Ukraine operation was Ganga.  (c) A river name, but not the one used. The option set is built by putting three other Indian river names beside the real answer, which is a common UPPSC device: the candidate who half-remembers 'an operation named after a river' still has to know which river. The Ukraine evacuation was Ganga.  (d) Again a plausible-sounding river name rather than the actual codename. Nothing in the 2022 Ukraine evacuation was designated Yamuna; the operation was announced and reported throughout as Operation Ganga.

Concept: Protecting nationals abroad is a standing function of the Ministry of External Affairs, and India has built a recognisable pattern for doing it: a named operation, an inter-ministerial control room, embassies in neighbouring safe countries acting as forward bases, and a mix of Indian Air Force transports and chartered or scheduled civil aircraft. The 2022 Ukraine case had one feature that shaped everything else — the target country's airspace was closed by war, so India could not fly in at all. The operation therefore had to be run as a land evacuation to third countries followed by an airlift, which is why the transit states of Romania, Hungary, Poland, Moldova and Slovakia matter as much to the answer as Ukraine does. The affected population was also unusual: the great majority were medical undergraduates, a consequence of the large numbers of Indian students who study MBBS in eastern Europe because of the cost and competition for seats at home.

State PCS 2022 Q63 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2022 Q63 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer