The Sky Nurse Of Kavaratti  

In 2004, a 19-year-old nursing student fled the burns unit of Rajiv Gandhi School of Nursing in Hubli, North Karnataka. The screams of severely burnt patients were too much to bear. Aysha Beebi K walked out, certain that this was not the life for her. Twenty-two years later, on May 12, 2026—International Nurses Day— the President of India placed the National Florence Nightingale Award in her hands.

Aysha Beebi, 41, hails from Andrott Island and works as a contract nurse at Indira Gandhi Hospital in Kavaratti, Lakshadweep. The award, India’s highest honour for nursing professionals, recognised her meritorious and compassionate service—but it was one particular night in Jan that brought her to national attention.

On Jan 6 this year, she was on duty at the hospital in Kavaratti when a call came in the early hours. A woman on Andrott Island—seven months pregnant, already in labour—needed emergency evacuation to the mainland immediately. The baby, if born prematurely, would require neonatal intensive care that the island could not provide.
A helicopter was dispatched. It reached Andrott in thirty minutes.
“I realised the challenge before me the moment I saw her,” Aysha Beebi recalls. “I had to ensure she did not give birth in the aircraft.”
The stakes were higher than they might appear.

The baby was precious to the couple in a way that made every minute count—they had lost their first child a year earlier to premature labour. The plan had been for the couple to travel to Kochi by ship that same day. But when they reached the port, labour pains began, forcing them back to the island hospital.

Now, with no doctor on board—only Aysha Beebi, the woman’s husband, and her mother-in-law, both of whom were in panic—the helicopter lifted off for the mainland. It would be a two-and-a-half-hour flight to Cochin International Airport.

What followed demanded everything Aysha Beebi had learned across nearly two decades and roughly 60 emergency evacuation cases.

“In the helicopter, while the woman was wriggling with labour pain, I kept urging her to hold on and not to push. I kept her legs elevated to prevent the labour from progressing,” she says. Throughout the flight, she relayed updates to medical teams on the ground, coordinating the reception that would be waiting at the airport.

At one point, she could see the baby’s head. She did not intervene.
“If I had delivered the baby on the aircraft, the newborn would not have survived. And if the mother developed post-labour bleeding at that altitude, with no facilities around us, it could have been fatal for her too. I had to make sure neither of those things happened.”

At the airport, a medical team and ambulance were ready. The plan was to take the woman to Ernakulam General Hospital. But Aysha Beebi assessed her condition and made a quick call—she would not make it that far. She informed the medical officials and redirected the ambulance to Kalamassery Medical College, which had a neonatal intensive care unit.

The ambulance driver, she says, was a quiet hero of his own—coordinating with the hospital and the district collector’s office as they raced through the early morning.

They almost made it. “As the ambulance reached the gate of the medical college, she gave birth. A baby boy, weighing 1.5kg.”
The family stayed at the hospital until the baby grew to 2.5kg. Then they went home to Lakshadweep. Aysha Beebi still calls to check on the child.

Nursing in Lakshadweep is not a profession for those who need certainty. The islands are remote, the infrastructure limited, and emergencies do not wait for ideal conditions. Aysha Beebi has worked through Cyclone Okhi, through Covid, and through countless nights when the nearest specialist was a helicopter ride and a prayer away.

She credits her ability to show up, again and again, to the people around her. Her husband Mohammed Arif, a lab assistant in Kavaratti, manages the household and their family life entirely — a quiet, necessary partnership that makes her unpredictable schedule possible. “Without his support, I would not be able to extend help to the needy whenever it was required,” she says.

Her grandfather, N Khalid, who served as a male nursing officer in Lakshadweep in the 1950s, and her uncle first pointed her toward the profession. And her mother, she says, gave her the instruction she has carried into every ward, every evacuation flight, every difficult night.

“My mother told me never to show the frustration of work pressure towards patients or their families. Comforting patients should always be the priority.” She pauses. “I think that is why many people call me to say they keep my name in their prayers.”

The 19-year-old who ran from the burns unit in Hubli would perhaps not recognise the woman who stood before the President on May 12. But the distance between those two moments was built not on luck or talent alone. It came from a decision made quietly, again and again over two decades: to stay with the work, even in its hardest momen