177 Indians home from Japan

Twenty-year-old Shipra Chauhan of Lucknow, who had gone to the country to pursue her doctorate in material science at an institute in Ibaraki in April last year, was absolutely relaxed after she landed here at the Indira Gandhi International Airport.

“It was horrible when the earthquake began. We were then working inside our institute. All of us were immediately taken out of  the building. The earth continued shaking terribly for about three hours a nd it was so frightening to see people crying all around,” she recalled.

Shipra, who returned here along with 176 others by a Japan Airlines flight, recalled that people were facing shortage of food and water.

Forty-year-old Rajkumar Mehra, a resident of Delhi, heaved a sigh of relief after he safely reached the airport from Yokohama. “Panic was growing since the calamity. It is good we came out from there. The Japanese authorities are not hyping the expected disaster that may engulf many areas due to nuclear radiation but the situation seemed to be grim,” Mehara, who had been in Japan for the last 13 years, said.

Reema Singh, who had gone to Saitama city to undergo a teachers’ training course, said the Japanese government was making an all-out effort to control the situation.

“The situation is not as critical as is being projected in the media,”  Reema, who is a foreign language teacher at English and Foreign Language University in Hyderabad, said.

Natasha Sharma, a foreign language teacher at Delhi University, who too had gone to Saitama city to undertake a training course with Reema, said “it was all over by the time we moved out from there.”

After passengers arrived at IGI, they were scanned for radiation by a team of Nuclear Disaster Management Core Group.