After Yemen rescue, calls grow for permanent Indian crisis staff

New Delhi: India`s evacuation of more than 3,000 nationals from Yemen has been a triumph of improvisation, but some officials in Prime Minister Narendra Modi`s government say a slow response to the crisis has underlined the need for a full-time staff to protect Indians abroad.

On Monday, India rescued more than 1,000 people by plane and ship, the most on a single day since Saudi Arabia launched air strikes against Iran-allied Houthi rebels in Yemen on March 26. India has been asked by 26 nations - including the United States - to help get their citizens out of the conflict zone.

Yet New Delhi struggled for several days to ramp up its rescue effort and had to hire a ship to make the first evacuation of its nationals from the port of Aden as fighting escalated there.

Government insiders draw unfavourable comparisons with China`s swifter evacuation of 570 nationals on warships that was completed on March 31. An Indian navy patrol vessel made a first evacuation only on the following day.

"The Chinese were way ahead in the rescue process," said one senior foreign ministry official, requesting anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter.

India`s rescue effort got off to a false start, with planes commandered from Air India sitting idle in Muscat, Oman, because it was impossible to negotiate the opening of a safe air corridor with the Saudis.

Things only really got moving with the deployment of Foreign Minister VK Singh - a retired army chief - to a forward operations base in Djibouti, on the other side of the Gulf of Aden, from where Indian Air Force C-17 transporters have been picking up evacuees brought out by Air India from Sanaa and flying them home.

A second official said the challenges of evacuating thousands of Indian nationals from fighting in Iraq last year had shown that a full-time staff was needed to rescue overseas Indians in times of crisis.

"We were late in assessing the crisis - and this was exactly the same case during the Iraq crisis," this official said.

The scramble jars with Modi`s ambition to boost India`s global clout, by increasing the military`s ability to project power and connecting with a large and widely dispersed diaspora that was long neglected by New Delhi.

The Ministry of External Affairs has, however, rebutted criticism that it was slow to warn more than 4,000 Indians living in Yemen to leave, saying it issued the first of a series of advisories in January as the security situation deteriorated.

Foreign ministry spokesman Syed Akbaruddin declined to comment on calls for a permanent evacuation staff, saying the rescue had gone remarkably well in difficult conditions.

"It was much more perilous, the circumstances were more turbulent, and diplomatically it was a tightrope walk," said Akbaruddin.

No Indians have been reported killed or wounded in the fighting in Yemen.

Foreign assets

There are 21 million people of Indian origin abroad and they send home an estimated $70 billion a year in remittances - more than any other country receives from its overseas workers.

One-fourth of these overseas Indians are in the Middle East, mainly nurses, construction workers, drivers and hotel staff. India evacuated 7,000 citizens from Iraq last year, and nearly 18,000 from Libya in 2011, as fighting swept these nations.