With more than 15,000 Sikhs living in Gravesend and the surrounding areas, many have friends and family members living in India - the current epicentre of the coronavirus pandemic.

Passing the grave landmark of 20 million cases yesterday, the world's media is focused on the crisis cutting its way through the heart of the country.

Overrun hospitals and a severe lack of ventilators mean thousands cannot access the care they need, increasing the number of deaths to more than 220,000 since Covid-19 first appeared last year.

Pooja Kaur, from Gravesend, has been keeping in constant contact with her father, Daljit, who travelled out to India at the beginning of March after her aunt was diagnosed with terminal cancer.

At the time the country was not yet experiencing the full grip of the new India variant, known as B.1.617 - and it had not yet been added to the UK government's travel ban list.

Pooja said: "There was no indication that India was going to be put onto the red list. If we'd known that I don't think we'd have sent our dad out, because he's got his own health risks as well.

"He's got heart conditions, asthma, high blood pressure and diabetes."

Her 65-year-old father is now isolating in their family home in Punjab to wait for news of an earlier return flight.

Pooja said: "At the moment his return ticket isn't until August.

"He's just at home isolating and not going out or meeting anyone."

Aside from a lack of airlines offering flights back to the UK from India, Pooja and her family also have to consider the extortionate price of seats which do become available - as well as the price of having to isolate in a government-approved hotel for ten days on his return.

She added: "We've told him to make sure he stays indoors and keep to himself, because if anything happens to him we can't even go out there, it'll be extremely hard for us to provide him with any support."

As the crisis worsens, the British government announced plans to send three oxygen generation units the size of shipping containers to help the country tackle the virus.

Each units is capable of producing 500 litres of oxygen per minute, enough for 50 people to use at a time.

Hearing of the dire situation from friends and relatives, Gravesend's Sikh community have sought to raise enough funds to send 100 oxygen generators to the north of the country.

The town's Guru Nanak Darbar Gurdwara has set up a fundraising page to pay for the equipment, and has so far raised nearly £10,000 from donations across North Kent's communities.

Jagdev Singh Virdee, general secretary at the gurdwara, is now busy trying to arrange direct delivery of the devices to parts of Punjab, as more donations continue to flood in.

He said: "Speed is very much of the essence. We don't want to just send cash, it's actually to fly the equipment here and then getting it flown out to where it's needed.

"All the news coverage is on Delhi but there's need in rural areas, in the towns across the country.

"In the remote areas they normally have to go into the big cities for any significant health care, so as Covid spreads in those areas, they've obviously got far fewer facilities than in the big cities."

The ventilators they are purchasing are capable of delivering between five to10 litres per second and cost around £250.

Jagdev has many family members living in India, both in Punjab and the capital of Delhi.

Watch: Jagdev Singh Virdee has helped lead the fundraising project

Five of them contracted the virus, and one has been in hospital for the past 11 days.

He said: "They were lucky they managed to get places in hospital and got treatment.

"But they also know many other people who have not been so lucky."

Jagdev's colleagues have also been keeping close contact with family back in India.

Nanak Singh, the vice president of the gurdwara, calls his elderly mother every morning.

The 63-year-old said: "I'm scared, I'm worried for my mother. She's 94.

"She's not allowed to go outside and get any shopping, I've asked my friends to deliver the food and other things to her home.

"And the flights have stopped now, so if anything happens it's very hard to go to Punjab now."

His family are from a small village in northern India, which had been somewhat sheltered from the pandemic in comparison to the major cities.

But one resident who had travelled from Delhi died of Covid-19 just a few days ago.

There have been times when the TV coverage has been too much for Nanak to watch.

He said: "Sometimes I switch off because I just couldn't see it - bodies in the street, bodies burning. Too many people are dying at the moment."

Since the gurdwara began crowdfunding for donations towards the ventilators, they have been inundated with calls and messages from communities all across North Kent.

Kent's equality chief Gurvinder Sandher said: "There's an immediate requirement for help in India for help and support and I'm so humbled that the communities of Kent have come together across faiths, across Gravesham and Dartford to support this initiatives.

"Sometimes I switch off because I just couldn't see it - bodies in the street, bodies burning..."

"I've had calls from people from all different faith organisations contacting me saying 'how can we help.'"

With around 800 million people in India living below the poverty line, Gurvinder is working with the team at the gurdwara to get the ventilators to those rural areas more cut off from support than the major cities.

He added: "We're trying to do our little bit from here in Kent to support those in north India in particular."

What do we know about the B.1.617 variant?

The B.1.617 variant was first identified in India in October, then identified in the UK on February 22.

The rise in B.1.617 cases in the UK convinced the government to place India on the travel red list.

Speaking last month, Professor Sir Mark Walport, former chief scientific adviser to the government, suggested the ban should have been put in place much earlier.

He said: "These decisions are almost inevitably taken a bit too late, in truth, but what’s absolutely clear is that this variant is more transmissible in India.

"You can see that it’s becoming the dominant variant, and the other concern about it is that it has a second change in the spike protein which may mean that it’s able to be a bit more effective at escaping an immune response, either a natural one or vaccine-induced one, so there’s good reasons for wanting to keep it out of the country if at all possible."

The B.1.617 carries two mutations - E484Q and L452R - and both have been found separately in lots of coronavirus mutations.

But this variant is the first time they have been found together.

The mutations are found in the spike protein of the virus, which helps to bind itself to the cell's receptors and gain entry into a host cell.

To donate to the Guru Nanak Darbar Gurdwara Covid fund for India, click here

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