LONDON: Whilst several thousand Indian nationals and OCI cardholders remain stuck in Britain, dead bodies at least are being flown back to India.The body of Siddharth Murkumbi (23) was the first to be flown back to India after New Delhi closed Indian airspace to schedule international passenger flights. He had been pursuing an MBA in marketing since September 2019 at the University of Central Lancashire. His body was flown back on April 9 to Mumbai on an Air India flight that had been chartered by the British government to bring back Britons stranded in India.There are at least two more bodies that need to be flown back. One is of an Indian student from Warangal, near Hyderabad, who suffered a cardiac arrest. The other is an Indian professional from Bengaluru who passed away just before the Indian lockdown. By the time the post-mortem was completed, India was in lockdown. His corpse will be sent on a charter flight when it picks up British people from Bengaluru as his family wants him cremated in India.A third case is a British Indian who died of Covid-19 in Harrow . “He was alone here and all of his family is in India. His family in Bengaluru wanted his body to be flown back. But the UK authorities are saying because he tested Covid-19 positive he has to be cremated in the UK,” a community source told TOI.“Dead bodies are being flown back on the Air India flights chartered by the British government to whichever airport in India these charter flights are coming from. However, no one else is allowed to go back at present,” a government of India source told TOI.Out of the thousands of PIOs in the UK that wish to return, there are 20 “emergency cases” of which 18 are Indian citizens or OCI card holders whose next of kin (either a parent or sibling) has died in India. Two of them had to watch the funerals being live-streamed onto their mobiles on FaceTime. Another two are cases where one parent is very ill in India and there is no one else to take care of them.“If the government of India decides to allow flights, then these emergency cases will go on the first flights,” the source said.Student bodies Indian National Students Association UK (INSA UK) and the National Indian Students and Alumni Union UK (NISAU) estimate there are more than 10,000 Indian students stuck in Britain who are desperate to leave.NISAU wrote a letter on Wednesday to the Indian high commission here asking for a hardship fund to be set up for the stranded students. A NISAU spokesperson said: “The number of distressed calls we have received since the extension until May 3 was announced has really gone up. Some students are suicidal. Some have lost next of kin in India. Others have lost their part-time jobs and have run out of money and cannot afford accommodation. Many took massive loans to come and study here and the rupee does not translate well into pound. We are also in touch with elderly people who travelled here to visit their children and they are running out of prescription medicines and they are not registered with doctors here.”INSA is organising free food, support and both free and subsidised accommodation to these stranded students, as well as to stranded Indian tourists and business people. There are at least 1,200 Indian tourists and business people stranded in Britain.Amit Tiwari, president of INSA UK, said INSA and members of the community had set up a phone help line being manned by PIO volunteers on a rota basis to help them. “We have taken 2,500 phone calls and received 1,800 emails. Twenty PIO doctors are helping students with physical and mental health issues and a lawyer is helping with accommodation issues. We are using our network to get subsidised rates in hotels or providing free houses for them and we are providing free food. There are many tourists who have run out of funds who cannot continue to pay for hotels who we are helping. Some people are being put up in an ashram. We even have parents calling us asking us to get their kids back. I took a call from an elderly couple in Delhi with health issues who need their son back to support them. We are getting so many heart-wrenching emails and texts.”On April 13 the Supreme Court of India heard a petition calling for Indians stranded in the UK to be flown back to India but the court ruled they could not be flown back immediately and deferred the plea for four weeks. In its affidavit the Centre said that the government wanted to prevent the severe risk posed by arrivals from an increasing number of countries affected by Covid-19 and though it had initially evacuated Indians and other nationals from China, Iran, Italy and Japan, that was before the coronavirus situation in India was so grim. The Centre said it was not feasible to selectively evacuate Indian citizens from abroad when a large number from a number of countries want to return.“The number of students in the UK who don’t want to go back from the UK are much more than the number that do want to go back,” the government source said. 30,550 Indians were granted student visas in the year ending September 2019.