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Same thing is happening in my country as well. recently India started air-lifting their citizens from Middle East and the citizens have paid double than the normal price. More over these citizens are forced to pay for their 14 days isolation is various hotels at their home state. That's definitely not right but government is also helpless at this moment.
The problem here is the notion of government is helpless, have you heard about the
PM CARES Fund and they raised more than 1000 crores INR and then they have another fund collection
Prime Minister's National Relief Fund and that has similar amounts or larger amounts. What they do with these huge amount of funds is not clear, they are taking money from poor labor jobless people in the name of evacuation and what are these charity funds collected
. You are aware how many people walked 100 to 200 km just to reach home and some were not even lucky as they lost their life during these mass migration from the poor.
Have you seen the news that the RBI has written off bad loans aka Non-performing assets of 66000 crore mainly from businessman and other wealthy people. How much money was needed to give all the poor people some funds during a situation like this rather than writing off loans of the wealthy .
You clearly mentioned about the flight charges they are forcing them to pay to reach home, hope you heard about the issue that posed by Qatar where the Indian government said the repatriation flight are rescue missions which means they wont collect money while they were charging exorbitant charges and Navy Ships are collecting tickets and carrying people in the name of repatriation
.
Lack of clarity on what they will be using with these billions of amount collected in the name of charity should be public.
In my country, government has closed down all liquor and tobacco shops when the lock down started almost 50 days ago and every single state is now facing a huge revenue shortfall. Also normal service class people and spending very cautiously so they are not generating a good amount of tax revenue as well.
Still many states are not allowing home delivery of liquor and i have no idea why they want to restrict which is bullshit.
It's a very uncommon time my friend. I am sure, our generation will remember 2020 for the rest of their life!
No one experienced this in their life time and it is highly unlikely anyone would forget these weird situations.
The amount of money collected will not help the government do anything since it's too minuscule. So I doubt it is their strategy to extort money. Anyway, you can go to the embassy and ask for help, and keep the "government is evil" thing for yourself and try to cooperate at the moment because it won't help you there.
If a government consider these are pennies then why don't they write off all these charges and help the citizens rather than charging exorbitant rates when there is no job and there is no clarity when they will get the opportunity to work again.