People coming from Dubai and the UK contributed the most of the COVID-19 importation cases in India, a study by IIT Mandi reportedly said.

The research has reportedly been published in the Journal of Travel Medicine and says that the pandemic could gain a foothold in the country primarily due to international travels.

NDTV quoted Sarita Azad, Assistant Professor, IIT Mandi as saying to PTI, ""We tracked the spread of COVID-19 and its diffusion from the global to national level and identified a few super spreaders who played a central role in the transmission of the disease in India. The COVID-19 spread in phase one was traced using the travelling history of the patients, and it was found that most of the transmissions were local."

She further said, "The research team has used the travel history of infected patients from January to April as the primary data source and a social network was created depicting the spread in the early phase of the pandemic. The research found that the maximum numbers of connections were established from Dubai (144) and the UK ( 64)."

"Dubai's eigenvector centrality was the highest that made it the most influential node. The statistical metrics calculated from the data revealed that Dubai and the UK played a crucial role in spreading the disease in Indian states and were the primary sources of COVID-19 importations into India," she added.

The study also claims that infected cases from Tamil Nadu, Delhi and Andhra Pradesh didn't play as big a role in spreading the disease outside their communities as did states like Gujarat, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Kerala, Jammu and Kashmir, and Karnataka.