India-UK flights to resume from January 8 from Mumbai, Delhi

Photo used for representational purpose

Passenger flights between the UK and India, which were suspended over a mutant variant of coronavirus, will resume from January 8.

On Friday, Union Aviation Minister Hardeep Singh Puri said that flights between India and UK will resume from 8 January, 2021. "Operations till January 23 will be restricted to 15 flights per week each for carriers of two countries to and from Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru and Hyderabad only," the minister said.

Last month, the Civil Aviation Ministry had suspended all flights between the European country and India from December 23 to December 31 and later the suspension was extended till January 7.

The central government on Friday said that four more cases of the mutant coronavirus UK strain have been detected in the country, taking the total tally of such cases to 29 so far. They are kept in physical isolation in health facilities.

Out of these 29 cases, eight have been registered at National Centre for Disease Control in Delhi, two at CSIR Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology in Delhi, 10 at National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro-Sciences in Bangalore.

Three such cases have been detected at Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad, five at National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro-Sciences in Bangalore, and one at National Institute of Biomedical Genomics in West Bengal.

On Tuesday, a total of six UK returnees were found to be positive with the new variant genome. These were the first cases to be reported by the country that has the second highest number of cases after the United States.

The British Government had recently announced that the newly identified strain of the virus found in their population is up to 70 per cent more transmissible.

Notably, the new UK variant has already been reported by Denmark, Netherlands, Australia, Italy, Sweden, France, Spain, Switzerland, Germany, Canada, Japan, Lebanon and Singapore.

From November 25 to December 23 midnight, about 33,000 passengers disembarked at various Indian airports from UK. All these passengers are being tracked and subjected by states and UTs to RT-PCR tests.

(With inputs from agency)