India has criticized the UK’s decision to exclude vaccinated Indian travelers from its new travel policies, calling it “discriminatory” and warning against mutual action.

The UK government will allow fully vaccinated travelers from a list of countries to skip the quarantine on arrival next month – but fully vaccinated Indians will still need to be quarantined.

Great Britain relaxed last week Travel restrictions on fully vaccinated people from 17 countries and territories including Japan and Singapore stating they do not need to be in quarantine for 10 days after arriving in England.

As of October 4th, travelers to these destinations will need to demonstrate that they have received a full course of any of the Covid vaccines. currently registered in the UK, at least two weeks before your arrival. The approved vaccines are: Oxford / AstraZeneca, Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna or Janssen.

India’s main vaccine comes from Oxford University and Anglo-Swedish pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca, but is manufactured locally by the Serum Institute of India under the name Covishield. He was Emergency approved by the World Health Organization.

“The basic problem is that it is a vaccine, Covishield, which is a licensed product from a British company that is manufactured in India,” Indian Foreign Minister Harsh V. Shringla said at a press conference on Tuesday. ” We have 5 million cans shipped in the UK, at the request of the UK government, we know this has been used in their national health system. “

“Therefore, not recognizing Covishield is a discriminatory policy and has an impact on those of our citizens traveling to the UK,” he added.

According to the new rules, Indian travelers must quarantine themselves after arriving in England and undergo three rounds of testing regardless of their vaccination status. Many Indian nationals usually come to the UK to work, study, travel for leisure or to visit their families.

Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, who is in New York for the United Nations General Assembly, “emphatically” raised the issue to British Foreign Minister Elizabeth Truss, according to Shringla.

“I have been told that some representations have been made that this issue will be resolved,” he said.

Jaishankar tweeted that during his meeting with Truss in New York, he was “pushing for a swift solution to the quarantine problem for mutual benefit.”

Indian opposition MP Shashi Tharoor said: he has withdrawn from a debate at the University of Cambridge because of the quarantine order.

“It is insulting to ask fully vaccinated Indians to self-quarantine,” he said.

Another legislature Jairam Ramesh said the decision “smells like racism”.

“We’ll have to see how it goes, but if we don’t get satisfaction we have the right to take mutual action,” added Shringla, without specifying what some of those actions might be.

Government data has shown that India has so far given more than 825 million doses of the vaccine in one of the largest vaccination campaigns in the world – around 15% of the country’s eligible population have received both of the doses required to be considered fully immunized, according to the Our online publication World In Data.

Homemade vaccine from the land of Bharat Biotech, called Covaxin, has yet to be approved from the World Health Organization. This is likely to make international travel plans even more difficult for many Indian nationals.