Kolkata: Sixty-eight ONGC engineers from the region, including 50-odd from Kolkata, who have been stranded in high seas on off-shore oil platforms in the Arabian Sea since the lockdown more than a month-and-a-half ago, returned on a special Air India flight on Thursday evening after being replaced by a fresh batch of workers.
The replacement workforce, including 80 workers from the east, had departed Kolkata in the first special flight to be operated for Indians on the domestic sector. Till now, all special flights have been to either repatriate foreigners stranded in India or Vande Bharat flights to evacuate Indians held up overseas.
Usually, men and women work on 14-day shifts on offshore oil platforms like Bombay High and oil and gas fields Bassein and Heera in the Arabian Sea and Krishna Godavari basin in Bay of Bengal. After spending a fortnight working on steel structures in the middle of the sea, they spend 14 days at home. But the crew that returned on Thursday evening were locked out in the Arabian Sea after the lockdown came into force on March 25.
