A 24-year-old pilot from New Town rescued more than 800 Indian students from the Polish and Hungarian borders of war-torn Ukraine.
A member of Operation Ganga, Mahasweta Chakraborty flew 6 evacuation flights between February 27 and March 7. Four of these flights were from Poland and two from Hungary.
Chakraborty, who has flown with a private Indian carrier for the past four years, says it was the biggest experience of her life. Some students were in their teens, some as young as twenty. Many of these were sick and was fighting for life. I salute their spirit of struggle.
Mahashweta says that I feel extremely proud to work in the mission of bringing back home students trapped in Ukraine. India operated 77 flights to rescue students stranded in Ukraine. Most of these were from Air India. Along with the Indian Air Force, airlines like Indigo, SpiceJet also operated flights in this operation.
Mahasweta tells about the operation that I got a call late in the night and was told that the airline company has selected me for the rescue operation. I packed in two hours and left the house. I flew to Istanbul. It is two and a half hours away from Poland, where we were given directions on how to conduct the rescue operation.
Pilot Mahashweta, a graduate of the Indira Gandhi Rashtriya Udan Akademi, says that after flying in the Airbus A320 for 13-14 hours a day, I could hardly understand my physical fatigue because the students who were with us were in an atmosphere of panic. She had come back from Most of them were in bad shape. We gave them food and drink, but they did not even want to drink water.
The Modi government also made tremendous efforts to evacuate Indian students under Operation Ganga. He sent 4 ministers to Poland, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia and Moldova borders. 24 ministers remained engaged at various airports to receive the returning students.
Mahasweta says that it is a matter of pride for me to work in Operation Ganga. Rescuing the people of our country trapped in the war-torn area was a challenging task, which we carried out with full dedication.