Sept 16 In May 2020, a couple of months into the pandemic, the Indian government cranked up machinery to bring citizens home from abroad. This was called the Vande Bharat Mission. Over the next several months, several thousand flights ferried Indians home from the Middle East, China, the USA, Australia, Europe, Africa ... by any standards, it was a remarkable effort.
Our External Affairs Minister, S Jaishankar, was in Saudi Arabia a few days ago. In a speech he gave, he claimed that the Vande Bharat Mission brought home seven million citizens. Something about that claim got the machinery in my own mind cranking. The result is my Mint math column for today, Sept 16. Take a look and let me know what you think. Or if you have any questions. Seven million mission? Maybe not, https://www.livemint.com/opinion/online-views/seven-million-mission-maybe-not-11663328928755.html (Note: This Mission is quite separate from what happened with workers in various Indian cities at the start of the pandemic. Left jobless and often homeless overnight by a lockdown, millions of them walked hundreds of miles across the country to get home. They got minimal help from the government.) cheers, dilip --- Seven million mission? Maybe not ------------------ Dilip D'Souza Seven million is a huge number, you'll agree. That's about the population of Hyderabad, or Rio de Janeiro - not the biggest cities in the world, but pretty big anyway. Yet merely citing some cities' populations may not let us grasp just how many people that is. Suppose all seven million lay in a line, heel to head all the way. How long would that line be? If an average human is 5.5 ft tall, the line would stretch about 12,000 km, or about a third of the way around the globe. Or suppose you started filling large cricket stadiums - like Eden Gardens in Kolkata - with these hordes. That great cricket institution can take about 70,000, so with seven million filing in, you'd fill 100 Eden Gardens. Or what about commercial aircraft? The typical modern long-distance plane - Boeing 777, Airbus 350 - carries about 350 people. How many flights by such airliners, to ferry seven million people? About 20,000. That's a lot of flights. Operating at full capacity, Mumbai's airport would take 20 days to handle that many. You get a sense with these examples, I trust, of the magnitude of this number of people. And perhaps you've guessed that I used flights deliberately. This is because of what our External Affairs Minister, S Jaishankar, said in Saudi Arabia a few days ago. Under the Vande Bharat Mission during the pandemic, he asserted, India repatriated seven million of its citizens from across the world. He was actually echoing what his colleague, Minister for Civil Aviation Hardeep Singh Puri, said in March 2021: that India had brought back 6.76 million "stranded & distressed citizens" (https://twitter.com/HardeepSPuri/status/1373650013889306625). "No one has done that," said Jaishankar. "That is India that the world sees today." What the world sees, I don't know. But me, when I see numbers like these, my mind almost automatically starts to fiddle with them, trying to grasp them, make sense of them. That's how I came up with those comparisons above - the 12,000km line, the 100 stadiums like Eden Gardens. The 20,000 flights, too. Did India actually operate that many flights under the Vande Bharat Mission? It's possible. I mentioned 20 full-capacity days at Mumbai's airport, but of course these flights were not flown like that at all. This was over several months, and spread across several airports around the country. So it's certainly plausible that Vande Bharat operated 20,000 flights. But let's look a little deeper. The Ministry of External Affairs actually maintains a list of all the Vande Bharat Mission flights ( https://mea.gov.in/vande-bharat-mission-list-of-flights.htm). They happened in 10 phases - or really, 14, because four were numbered "2 Additional", "2++", "8+" and "9+". All these flights happened between May 2020 and March 2021 - when Hardeep Singh Puri mentioned 6.76 million citizens. Take phase 1 (https://www.mea.gov.in/phase-1.htm). The web page lists 84 flights over 10 days in May 2020. They flew from locations like Abu Dhabi, Singapore, London and San Francisco. They flew into Mumbai and Mangalore, Thiruvananthapuram and Srinagar and more. A few listed flights, though, were domestic connections. For example, on 13 May, AI 990 flew from Kuwait to Mumbai with 149 aboard, and connected to AI 1613 from Mumbai to Ahmedabad, and the single 149 figure covers both flights. So the actual number of repatriation flights in Phase 1 is not 84, but 74. They brought home a total of 15,296 Indians. Divide 15,296 by 74 - that's about 207 passengers on each flight. Not 350 as I had hypothesized above. If each Vande Bharat flight carried only that many passengers, there would have to be about 34,000 such flights - not 20,000 - to ferry seven million Indians home. So ... let's look a little deeper still. Take phase 2 now (https://www.mea.gov.in/phase-2.htm), and the list on the MEA page again includes connecting and onward domestic flights. For example, on 23 May 2020, AI 174 brought 225 people from San Francisco to Delhi. After a "technical halt" in Delhi, it flew on to Kochi, and then to Ahmedabad - that last leg labelled "feeder". The only reason I mention such connections again is that there's a subtle but important difference from the phase 1 list. In phase 2, the 225 figure is attached to all three flights. Take a moment to digest that. A cursory glance at the list would suggest that these are three repatriation flights with 225 returning Indians on each - for a total of 675 Indians - whereas in reality it is just 225 of them on one flight home. This pattern of numbers ascribed to connections repeats all through that list, and in fact through every subsequent phase's list too. Correcting for it gives us a phase 2 total of 158 flights carrying 31,274 people, or an average of just under 200 people per flight. Making these corrections through all the phases is hard work. (Maybe it was meant to be.) It's made even more confusing by the mention of dozens of flights without passenger numbers, and dozens of domestic "feeders" without their corresponding international flights mentioned. I worked it out as best I could, though I'll spare you the detailed numbers. The 14 phases list a total of 11,457 Vande Bharat Mission flights into India. Given all the confusion, this could be wrong - but by no more than a few hundred. Let's call it a round 12,000 flights. Let's be generous - considering the phase 1 and phase 2 averages of 207 and 200 respectively - and say each flight carried 250 passengers. That gives us a total of three million Indians repatriated. By any standards, that's a remarkable achievement. Compare to the previous large-scale repatriation of Indians, before the 1991 Gulf War. That time, we brought home 170,000 people. The Vande Bharat Mission was nearly 20 times larger. Three million is an enormous number. So why would External Affairs Minister Jaishankar and Civil Aviation Minister Puri more than double it? -- My book with Joy Ma: "The Deoliwallahs" Twitter: @DeathEndsFun Death Ends Fun: http://dcubed.blogspot.com -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Dilip's essays" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to dilips-essays+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/dilips-essays/CAEiMe8ope0PX3YZr19YLgKEmH1Y6mT4fqmvFzzFcgiri%2BsZ2ag%40mail.gmail.com.