The Union health ministry on Thursday lifted the mandatory condition for international passengers to undergo a seven-day home quarantine after arriving in India.
In a set of revised guidelines, the ministry said that the passengers will be required to “self-monitor” their health for 14 days and isolate themselves in case any symptoms of Covid-19 develop.
The new guidelines will come into effect from February 14.
Under the new guidelines, the health ministry has also scrapped the separate set of rules for passengers flying from “at-risk” countries. Earlier, travellers from “at-risk” countries were required to submit samples for Covid-19 testing on their arrival in India. They were allowed to leave the airport premises only after their test results came.
The government also introduced an option for passengers from 82 countries to upload their certificate of full vaccination on the “Air Suvidha” portal, instead of a negative RT-PCR report.
The 82 countries are those which have an agreement with India on mutual recognition of vaccination certificates of nationally recognised or World Health Organization-recognised vaccines, or those which provide quarantine-free entry to Indians, The Indian Express reported.
On January 7, India had announced mandatory home quarantine for seven days for all international passengers. The decision was taken at a time when the country was registering an exponential surge in coronavirus cases due to the spread of the Omicron variant.
On Thursday, India recorded 67,084 new coronavirus cases, pushing the overall infection count to 4,24,78,060 since the pandemic began in January 2020. The number of new cases was 5.99% fewer than Wednesday’s count of 71,365 Covid-19 cases.
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