The UK will receive the first batch of 3 million paracetamol packets from India by Sunday as it expressed gratitude to the Indian government for approving this “important shipment” after New Delhi lifted its export ban amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Lord Tariq Ahmad, the Minister of State for South Asia and the Commonwealth in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), on Friday said the shipment is symbolic of the cooperative way both countries have been working through this unprecedented global crisis.

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“The UK and India continue to work in close partnership to respond to the COVID-19 threat. My sincere thanks on behalf of the UK government to India for approving this important shipment,” Ahmad said.

The shipment, set to arrive on a plane by Sunday, will coincide with a series of charter flights laid on by the UK to ferry thousands of Britons stranded in India. “We have been working very closely with the Indian authorities in London, the Ministry of External Affairs, and at state level in India to put in place all the necessary requirements for British nationals wanting to return to the UK,” Ahmad said.

“The sheer logistics of this exercise involves every individual who has registered on to our central database being sent detailed information about booking their seat on the flights as well as local support for them to be able to get to the airports in the particular states, given the lockdown and curfews in place,” he said.

The travellers are set to be flown out from Goa, Mumbai, Delhi, Amritsar, Ahmedabad, Thiruvananthapuram via Kochi, Hyderabad, Kolkata and Chennai via Bengaluru over the coming week.