KUWAIT: Addressing a gathering of the Indian community here in Kuwait City while on his first bilateral visit to the Gulf nation, India's external affairs minister S Jaishankar said that the second wave of COVID-19 was receding in India and the government 'really moved mountains' to contain the pandemic. 

Jaishankar who arrived on his first bilateral visit to the oil-rich Gulf nation said in the meeting, "The second wave of the COVID-19 has started to recede and a large part of it has been made possible by very very vigorous government response to the second wave. The kind of effort and energy that I saw, the long hours that people put in. People really moved mountains to respond to what was an unprecedented situation."

He also said that the daily number of new infections is less than what it was in early May and the positivity rate has also come down dramatically.

On the issue of oxygen availability, the minister said the government ran hundreds of trains to ferry oxygen from the production centres to the major cities. "All our planes were mobilised, including the Air Force planes for the oxygen cylinder tanks to be moved, both within the country and from abroad to India," he said.

On the vaccination programme, Jaishankar accepted that it was a 'big issue' and 3 million people were being vaccinated daily and its pace will pick up in the coming days as the production of the vaccines scales up.

Earlier, Jaishankar held a meeting with India's envoys to the Gulf nations to discuss a host of issues, including encouraging the speedy resumption of flights to this region and facilitating reuniting families separated by COVID disruption.

He said the Indian missions in the crucial Gulf region have been told to do whatever they could to help the Indian community during the pandemic.