New Delhi: Coming down heavily on the United Kingdom for its decision to consider travellers from India with both doses of Covishield vaccines (Oxford-AstraZeneca’s vaccine manufactured by Serum Institute of India) to be still considered “unvaccinated”, Indian Foreign Secretary Harsh Vardhan Shringla today told journalists that non-recognition of Covishield was a “discriminatory policy and does impact on those of us our citizens travelling to the UK”.
Shringla informed that Indian External Affairs Minister, Dr. S.Jaishankar raised the issue “strongly” with the new Foreign Secretary of the United Kingdom and “certain assurances have been given that this issue would be resolved”. In the same breathe though, Shringla also talked about invoking “reciprocal measures”.
The Foreign Secretary said: “We have also offered some of our partner countries the option of mutual recognition of vaccine certification. But these are reciprocal measures. I think obviously, as we go along, we will have to see how it goes. But if you don’t get satisfaction, we would be within our eyes to impose reciprocal measures.”
It may be recalled that the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW) had got in touch with the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) over the UK government’s recent COVID-19-related travel restrictions following its non-acceptance of Covishield beneficiaries from India in the UK.
Referring to the issue of the UK’s approach on vaccines, Shringla pointed out that Covishield was a licensed product of a UK company manufactured in India. Of this, he noted, India had already supplied 5 million doses to the UK at the request of the government of the UK.
In the same context, Shringla also pointed out to the US decision to upgrade India under a “certain category”, to ensure that the process to provide visas for Indian students who had to travel to the US to join universities, colleges, institutions were speeded up.
“I think that process is now over. They’re now moving from what I understand to the professional category, where a number of professionals would be given visas, Indian professional to travel to the US,” he said. He also referred to the media report that that fully vaccinated travellers would be allowed to freely travel to the US. “This I think is a positive news because if you look at our rate of vaccination, we have administered over 800 million doses,” he said.
– global bihari bureau
