China sends 24 flights with Covid-19 medical supplies, 20 more this week

Requests for 20 flights for medical supplies to India have been placed with the Civil Aviation Administration of China

Updated on: Apr 20, 2020, 17:15:21 IST

Hindustan Times, New Delhi | By Shishir Gupta

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Chinese companies are expected to send about 20 planeloads of Covid-19-related medical supplies to India over the next one week, a senior government official said.

China will be sending 20 cargo flights to India with medical supplies between April 21 and 27 (Reuters)

Requests for these flights between April 21 and 27 have been placed with the Civil Aviation Administration of China, the official said. The continuing cooperation is seen as a signal that the two countries are in sync on the Covid-19 battle despite some concerns that led India to impose restrictions on foreign takeover of Indian companies.

Over the last two weeks beginning April 4, around 24 flights have taken off from Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Xi’an and Hong Kong to India carrying 390 tonnes of medical supplies.

These include RT-PCR test kits, Rapid Antibody tests, thermometers, personal protection equipment.

According to information compiled by the external affairs ministry, the major consignees were Imperial Life Sciences, HLL, Matrix Labs, Invex Healthcare, Max and companies of the Reliance, Tata, Adani group. There were four state governments in this list too: Karnataka, Assam, Tamil Nadu and Rajasthan.

The consignments from China included the 650,000 testing kits received in two cargo flights last week. Officials had then said that Chinese companies have been contracted for nearly 15 million PPE kits and 1.5 million rapid testing kits by the government and private firms.

Indian ambassador to China, Vikram Misri, last week described facilitating India’s imports of Covid-19-related medical equipment and keeping the drug production supply chain open the “best” signal from China for bilateral ties.

India had also sent a plane load of medical equipment to China’s coronavirus-hit city of Wuhan when the crisis was at its peak in the neighbouring country.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shishir Gupta
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.Read More

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