Indian evacuations from Yemen r up

(MENAFN- Arab News) NEW DELHI: India's evacuation of nearly 4000 nationals from Yemen has been a triumph of improvization 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 1000 people by plane and ship the most on a single day since Saudi Arabia launched air strikes against the Houthi rebels in Yemen. 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 unfavorable comparisons with China's swifter evacuation of 570 nationals on warships that was completed on March 31.
An Indian navy patrol vessel was only able to go in 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 commandeered from Air India sitting idle in Muscat Oman.
Things only really got moving with the deployment of foreign office minister V.K. Singh a retired army chief to a forward operations base in Djibouti across the Gulf of Aden from where air force C-17 transporters have picked up evacuees brought out by Air India from Sanaa and flown 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' the second official said.
The scramble jars with Modi's ambition to boost India's global influence by increasing the military's ability to project power and connecting with a large and widely dispersed diaspora that was long neglected by the government.
The Ministry of External Affairs has however rebutted criticism that it was slow to warn more than 4000 Indians living in Yemen to leave saying it issued the first of a series of adviseries 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.
India flew 600 nationals out of Sanaa and Tuesday and plans to make its last evacuation flights from the capital on Wednesday the ministry said. No Indians have been reported killed or wounded in the fighting in Yemen.
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.