MP students brave 12 hours in freezing cold after dash for Romanian border

INDORE: Bearing the brunt of the war, four students from Indore and

Ujjain

were among hundreds of Indians to suffer a night in the open in freezing temperatures on the intervening night of Friday-Saturday after they managed to reach the Ukraine-Romania border for evacuation.

They spent at least 12 hours under the open sky while waiting for the Indian embassy to evacuate them.

Indore’s

Pranay Rao

and

Shubham Jirari

and Ujjain’s Akash Bhargava and Shivani Sharma were among 10 Indian students who arrived at the Romania border around 2am local time (around 5.30am IST) by hiring a bus. Officials from the Indian embassy contacted them around 10am (local time) and assured them help to cross the border.

Shubham is in the final year of his medical degree from Ternopil National Medical University.

“We are running out of cash. ATMs, which are hardly working, have long queues. Internet is patchy and we have food only for two days. Patience, courage, ca araderie and faith in the Indian government and God are giving us strength in this crisis. We last night in minus 4 degrees Celsius as there is no shelter on the Romania border,” he told TOI.

He said the 10 of them spent around Rs 60,000 (around 24,000 hryvnia) to hire the bus.

“We shared all the details with other Indian students and are guiding them to reach the Romania border. Indian students are asked to carry their ID cards, passport, ATM and credit cards, woollens, food and RT-PCR reports,” he said.

Around 150 more Indian students reached the border while the first group was waiting, Shubham said.

“The queue of vehicles, which is already 12km long, is only getting longer,” Jirati said, adding that students have no clue if they have to pay for tickets for the evacuation flight from Romanian capital Bucharest, which is around 500km from the border.

Shubham blamed Ternopil University for continuing offline classes till February 23 (Russia started attacks on February 24) and enforcing a penalty of around Rs 1,500 per day of absence.

“This is why we couldn’t leave Ukraine even after the advisory from the Indian embassy,” he said.

In

Kyiv

, Indoreans Ananta Barvey,

Rushail Shrivastava

, Anura Agrawal and Vidhi Vyas are stranded in a hostel with around 1,000 other students, mostly Indians. They are yet to hear from the Indian embassy about their evacuation.

“We have received an advisory to ‘stay safe’, but the embassy has not shared any plan to evacuate us,” Barvey said, adding that around 200 students spent the night in the hostel’s bunker after explosions and gunfire erupted in the area.

In India, family members of the stranded Indians are panicking.

“After trying very hard, I managed to book a flight ticket for my son Rushail on February 27 via Egypt and Dubai but since airports in Kyiv have shut down and all flights scheduled in the last two days cancelled, everything is uncertain,” Dr Ram

Kumar Shrivastava

said.

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