passed through<\/a> the Strait each day, the Joint Maritime Information Centre says.<\/p>\n\n\n\nAs food ran \u200bout and communication links snapped, Chiranjeevi lost contact with his widowed mother at home in the \u200bsouthern port city of Visakhapatnam.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“They (our families) were very concerned,” he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A colleague, Anant Singh Chauhan, also worried whether \u200che \u2060would be reunited with his parents, living in the town of Dewaria in India’s northern state of Uttar Pradesh.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“Sometimes, we used to feel we won’t be able to make it back home,” said Chauhan, who returned along with Chiranjeevi.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The South Asian nation is among the top three global \u200bsuppliers of seafarers, government \u200bfigures show, with a \u2060workforce 300,000-strong by September last year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Indian government says it has helped bring safely home about 3,000 sailors from the Gulf region, and at \u200bleast 23 this week.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Both men said they borrowed money at exorbitant \u200brates from relatives \u2060and moneylenders to pay fees of 450,000 rupees ($4,800) each to secure jobs on international shipping routes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
(Reuters) MUMBAI, May 7 – Nightly explosions of drones and missiles \u200bterrified Indian sailor Tithi Chiranjeevi after his ship was stranded in Iran for more \u200cthan a month by the\u00a0Strait of Hormuz\u00a0blockade caused by the\u00a0Middle East conflict. “Around 10 to 20 missiles struck every night. No one could sleep,” he told Reuters, describing conditions outside Iran’s port of Khorramshahr on his \u200breturn home last week, after an arduous 15-day journey through Iraq, Armenia, and Dubai. The \u200b28-year-old had spent the previous six months working on the Iranian ship \u2060Ilda, carrying construction material to Dubai. The vessel was one of 2,000… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":57398,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-57397","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news-in-english"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57397","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=57397"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57397\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":57399,"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57397\/revisions\/57399"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/57398"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=57397"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=57397"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=57397"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}