India: Back home from Ukraine, Kerala students concerned about future

Thiruvananthapuram: Dozens of students from Ukraine have been arriving in Kerala from Ukraine over the past fortnight, happy to touch home base but also nursing worries over the future of their education.

A few thousand students from Kerala, many of them studying medice, are estimated to be in Ukraine. Roughly 1,100 of them had contacted the Non-resident Keralites Affairs (Norka) department for assistance with evacuation from Ukraine.

“It wasn’t easy coming out of Kyiv, with trains being packed with fleeing local residents and a rush to exit the city. We walked 3km to the railway station, but seeing it was not possible to get into trains, we opted for cabs,” Zakir bin Rafeeq, a medical student at the Bogomolets National Medical University in Kyiv, hailing from Kanjirapally in Kottayam district told Gulf News.

Rafeeq and 11 of his friends exited the city in three cabs on February 28, reaching the Hungary border, from where they moved to Budapest before being flown to India.

“Things were getting extremely difficult in Ukraine, but once we reached the Hungary border, everything was taken care of. There were local volunteers helping us, we were given food and water, and provided free transport to Budapest,” Rafeeq said.

The Bogomolets University alone has roughly 800 Indian students, about half of them from Kerala.

No clarity whether credits can be transferred

Rafeeq is a third year medical student, and is concerned about what follows next. “We hear that we can continue our studies through a transfer to universities in Poland or Hungary with the credit scores, but there is no clarity yet,” he says. The university has announced closure till March 13.

Indian students in Bogomolets were provided extra classes in the local Ukrainian language, which is closely related to Russian. The medium of their medical education was English.

Ashik Shamnadh, also a medical student from Bogomolets University, told Gulf News that he was “satisfied” with the education, and hoped that things would clear up soon in Ukraine for students to return there and continue with their education.

Multiple disruptions

Medical students in Ukraine from Kerala have endured multiple disruptions over the past three years, and are now unsure about just when classes will be able to restart.

Third year medical students actually got to study only one year in Ukraine before COVID-19 forced them to continue the course online from India. It was only in late 2021 that most of them returned to classes in Ukraine, and now the Russian military intervention has forced them back home a second time.

One of the key reasons for Indian students leaving the country for medical education is the fierce competition for medical seats in India. The country has about 90,000 medical education seats, for which roughly 1.6 million appear for the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (NEET).

Happy tales, too

Among Keralites who returned from the conflict zones in Ukraine, there have been happy tales, too.

Siblings Christian and Catherine, children of Thrissur-based Viji James and Reny, took different routes from two different cities when they fled Ukraine and were unexpectedly reunited at a hotel in Budapest.

Two other students are glad they could evacuate their pets too when they left Ukraine. Anju Das from Chengannur in Kerala’s Alappuzha district, a fourth year medical student in Odessa, Ukraine, reached home with her Persian cat ‘Lockey’, while Arya Aldrin from Vandiperiyar in Idukki district brought home her pet dog from Kyiv, ‘Saira’.