Bring Ammu Home!

By Abhijit Menon-Sen <>

My daughter Kabani has been attending the Osaka University in Japan since September 2019 on a scholarship from the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT).

Her course concludes at the end of August 2020, and her visa expires in September. Because of the suspension of commercial flights into India during the COVID-19 pandemic, her return flight has not yet been booked.

She has been in touch with the Indian Embassy in Tokyo since June, but they have no information about repatriation flights in September, and can only advise her to wait and see if something will happen. Meanwhile, there is not a single Vande Bharat Mission flight from Japan in August.

The Japanese government is providing generous assistance to Indian scholarship students currently stranded in Japan. What is the Indian Government doing to bring them home? We need more #VandeBharatMission flights from Japan. @MEAIndia @MoCA_GoI

— Abhijit Menon-Sen (@amenonsen) August 6, 2020

Kabani is asking other Indian students in Japan to join her in a collective effort to request additional repatriation flights.

Update: She and some of her classmates did obtain seats on the Air India repatriation flight in August, and are back home now.