India's armed forces are expressing gratitude to lakhs of doctors, paramedics, sanitation staff and other front-line workers engaged in fighting the coronavirus pandemic by conducting aerial fly-pasts, lighting up ships at sea and showering flower petals on hospitals. The activities will go on for about 10 hours in different parts of the country throughout the day.
Chief of Defence Staff General Bipin Rawat on Friday announced that the three services would carry out a series of activities to thank the "corona warriors". The thanks-giving activities started with laying of wreaths at the police memorial in Delhi and in several other cities in the early morning to honour the police personnel deployed for enforcement of the nationwide lockdown. It's being followed by fly-pasts by fighter jets and transport aircraft of the Indian Air Force, covering a sizeable number of cities and towns across the country beginning 10 AM.
Cities, where fighter jets of IAF will conduct fly-pasts, include Delhi, Mumbai, Jaipur, Ahmedabad, Guwahati, Patna and Lucknow. Transport aircraft of the force will carry out similar drills in a number of cities including Srinagar, Chandigarh, Delhi, Jaipur, Bhopal, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Coimbatore and Thiruvananthapuram. They said fighter aircraft formations, comprising Sukhoi-30 MKI, MiG-29 and Jaguar, will be flying over Rajpath, Delhi's centrepiece boulevard, and will orbit over the city for around 30 minutes from 10 AM.
Check out latest visuals coming in from different parts of the country
Aircraft shower flowers on King George's Medical University in Lucknow.
Aircraft flypast Kalinga Institute of Medical Sciences in Bhubaneswar.
Air Force showers flower petals on Victoria Hospital, Bengaluru.
IAF chopper showers flower petals on the Police War Memorial in Delhi.
IAF chopper holds flypast over Government Hospital, Panchkula.
Navy chopper showers flower petals on Goa Medical College in Panaji.
With PTI and ANI inputs