Miss England Bhasha Mukherjee returns from India for virus duty

An India-born UK beauty crown winner who became Miss England in 2019 is answering a call from past colleagues at a hospital for her to lend a hand in dealing with the coronavirus pandemic.

Bhasha Mukherjee took a career break as a junior doctor after competing in the Miss World pageant in December 2019. Mukherjee represented England at the pageant after winning Miss England, CNN reports.

Invited to be an ambassador for several charities, Mukherjee had planned to hang up her stethoscope and focus on humanitarian work until August this year.

"I was invited to Africa, to Turkey, then to India, Pakistan and several other Asian countries to be an ambassador for various charity work," she told CNN.

At the beginning of March, the 24-year-old had been in India for four weeks on behalf of Coventry Mercia Lions Club, a development and community charity for which she was ambassador. They visited schools with donations of stationery, and also gave money to a home for abandoned girls.

But as the coronavirus situation worsened back home in the UK, Mukherjee was getting messages from former colleagues at her old hospital, the Pilgrim Hospital in Boston, eastern England, telling her how hard the situation was for them.

Mukherjee contacted the hospital's management team to let them know that she wanted to return to work.

She told CNN that it felt wrong to be wearing her Miss England crown, even for humanitarian work, while people around the world were dying from coronavirus and her colleagues were working so hard.

"When you are doing all this humanitarian work abroad, you're still expected to put the crown on, get ready... look pretty."

But, she added: "I wanted to come back home. I wanted to come and go straight to work."

Mukherjee, who moved to the English city of Derby from Kolkata at the age of 9, said: "I felt a sense of this is what I'd got this degree for and what better time to be part of this particular sector than now."

She returned to the UK today after working with the British High Commission in Kolkata to find a flight from India to Frankfurt, then to London.-Photo: CNN