Fear, anxiety for parents as some Indian students go missing in Ukraine

For the eighth consecutive day, S S Ravi has told his superiors at the automobile company in Chennai, where he has been working for several years, that he will not be coming in. 

His son, Gautham, a student of Kharkiv National Medical University, is still stranded in Poland. Ravi’s heart and mind are with him, and he says he will not be able to concentrate on work.

“I have been constantly sending messages to my son. I become paranoid if they are not delivered,” he tells The Federal. “Every few minutes, I check WhatsApp for the ‘last seen’ notification. After waiting for a couple of hours, I start ringing his friends’ families and sometimes his friends. Only after receiving a message or a call from him am I able to breathe easy.”

Also see: The Federal’s full coverage of the war in Ukraine

Ravi says the family has not been able to eat or sleep properly for the past week.

“How can we eat or sleep when we know what our son is going through?” he asks. “That’s what we think of… how our son is struggling without proper food or water.”

“We understand the situation he and other students are in. Yet our heart starts to race if he is unreachable for even a couple of hours,” Ravi says.

Following the Russian bombardment of Kharkiv, in the northeast, Gautham took a train west to Lviv. A city of 700,000 famous for its architectural beauty and cultural heritage, Lviv has seen an influx of terrified people fleeing Russian forces in the east. Most of them are hoping to travel onward to Poland.

As Gautham was trying to board the train, a police official attacked him, Ravi says.

“He switched off his phone after informing us that he had got on the train. He was bleeding. We just did not know what to do. We were so scared. We sat looking at the phone for hours together till we received a message from him,” he says, adding that it was only after hearing the news that his son had reached Poland safely that the family could relax.

Sharing a similar experience, Ramachandran, father of Sarath Chandran, who was struck in Ukraine, says: “The very fact that we could not help our children when they were in danger made us feel bad. If only I could, I would have travelled to Ukraine to bring back my son. I feel so helpless. Communicating with my son is the only solace.”

While he was on his way to Lviv from Kharkiv, Sarath was unreachable for about seven hours.

“It became even scarier when I came to know that my son had lost touch with his friends while boarding the train,” he says.

Also read: Is NEET driving students abroad to study medicine?

According to Team SOS India, a volunteer group helping Indian students in Ukraine, more than 140 students went missing when the war began. They have managed to track down about 120 so far.

Nitesh Singh, founder of the initiative, says even though students are advised to move in groups, more than 60 people cannot travel together because that is the maximum number of seats available in a bus. “The remaining students are forced to take either another bus or taxis. Sometimes, students rent private cabs – that’s how they go missing,” he says.

Rescue vehicles travel at high speed, he says. “So even if a student is missing for an hour or so, they will be lagging behind 60 to 80 kilometres by the time it comes to our knowledge.”

“When one student goes missing, the others become paranoid. They are already tired physically and mentally because of the war and travel and lack of food and water. We have formed a separate team to try and reach out to every missing student and their friends,” Singh says.

In most cases, the volunteers manage to trace the missing students within 24 hours, he adds.