Course Correction

As universities worldwide close their campuses, the future that a foreign education promised is suddenly looking bleak

- JASODHARA BANERJEE

Every morning, Aditya Sarda leaves his rented accommodation in New Jersey, US, and drives for about an hour in a friend’s car to reach, by 8.30 am, a construction site in Brooklyn, New York City, the Covid-19 hotspot in the US. The second-year student of masters in construction engineering and management at Stevens Institute of Technology is also an assistant project manager at the construction site of the Brooklyn high rise. Till May 11, the city had 335,000 confirmed cases of the coronavirus and 21,478 deaths from the infection.

“If I am not working, I am not making money,” says Aditya, 24, who chose to stay on in the US after his college announced that classes will not be conducted on campus any longer, and will move online; he is scheduled to graduate from his two-year course at the end of May. “I now have a job, which means I can stay on in the US for up to three years after I graduate. If I went back to India, I would lose this job, and would not know if I could get another one in the US later.”

That is why, when the Indian government started repatriating Indians from the US on May 9—the first of the initial seven non-scheduled commercial flights took off from San Francisco—boarding one of those flights was not an option for Sarda. For the sake of a career in the construction industry in the US, he feels it is better to stay on in the US—the worst-hit country in the pandemic—despite his family’s pleas to take one of the repatriation flights and head home to Nagpur.