India hails Canada’s move to ease travel restrictions

India has appreciated the decision by the Canadian government to remove the India-specific Covid-19 testing restrictions that were in place since September last year.

India’s high commissioner to Ottawa Ajay Bisaria said, “This is a welcome step towards restoring normal mobility and also ending a regime that discriminated against travellers from India.”

Canada updated its travel advisory for India on Thursday by removing the requirements for travellers to get a negative RT-PCR results for a test taken within 18 hours of departure of a flight, from a single laboratory operated by the company Genestrings at Delhi airport. That was applicable to direct flights being operated between the two countries.

Canada also required that passengers from India taking a connecting flight take the test in the third country which was the port of departure for a Canadian destination.

Both these requirements have been dropped. These amended measures went into force on Friday as Transport Canada announced they were dropping the “modified pre-departure test requirements” for travellers from India on direct or indirect flights. A release from the department said, “All travellers entering Canada are now subject to the same pre-entry test requirements, regardless of their departure country.”

India’s high commission had been working with Canadian authorities for normalisation of air travel for the past few months, particularly after Ottawa imposed a ban on all direct flights in April in the wake of the Delta-driven pandemic surge in India. That prohibition was lifted in September but replaced with the onerous testing regime, which only applied to one other country, Morocco.

Canada continues to “require that all travellers, unless specifically exempted, have a valid negative pre-departure Covid-19 molecular test result taken no more than 72 hours before a scheduled flight to Canada”.

Passengers need to provide proof of being fully vaccinated and, on arrival in Canada, some may be subject to a random Covid-19 test.