Over the last few days, this series has been exploring the issues surrounding labour migration from Sri Lanka, particularly the north. Here are the personal life stories behind the phenomenon. The people living in the post-war north, who feel impelled to migrate for socio-economic reasons.
Moving on from Malaysia where domestic workers were not faring particularly well – although still better off in general than the Gulf countries in their estimation – I crossed by land to Singapore. A city state built on migrant labour which continues to thrive on migrant labour. Due to its history, Singapore has a richer […]
More than 80% of our Sri Lankan emigrant labour are absorbed by the Gulf countries, according to the Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment; 34% of these are women, mostly domestic workers who get paid subsistence level salaries of Rs. 20-30,000 over there. As I went about interviewing various potential labour migrants, migrants’ families as […]
There is a spiking trend in women from war affected areas in the Northern Province migrating to the Gulf and other countries as housemaids – well behind the rest of the country. Complaints regularly crop up about the Government barring them from emigrating on this end, or not doing enough to repatriate them should they […]
An estimated 65,000 women left Sri Lanka’s shores as housemaids in the year 2016. Of these the greatest numberwere from Kurunegala and Colombo – 7,000 from each district as per statistics released by the Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment. The main exodus as per figures released by the SLBFE are from the South, West, […]
The number of people circumventing the legal route to go abroad for domestic work and unskilled jobs has increased. Without the help from the host countries, there cannot be a solution to the problem of trafficking, and exploitation, of migrant labourers. SITTING in a barely comfortable cubicle at the immigration counter, an officer can almost […]
Last year was an annus horribilis for 52-year-old Newton Gunathileka. A paddy smallholder from Sri Lanka’s north-western Puttalam District, 2017 saw Gunathileka abandon his two acres of paddy for the first time in over three-and-a-half decades, leaving his family almost destitute. The father of two had suffered two straight harvest losses and was over 1,300 […]
Rajayah Yenkampally, a 43-year-old native of the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, is on a train home from Mumbai. “I Landed at Mumbai airport from Kuwait today (Saturday). Still it hurts. I have 22 stitches in my head.” Yenkampally, who migrated to Kuwait in 2016 on a domestic worker visa, was forced to work […]
When Siri Hettige, a sociology professor at Colombo University, conducts surveys of young people across Sri Lanka, he never fails to ask one key question: Does anybody want to become a farmer? ‘No’ has been the overwhelmingly emphatic answer, he said. That is one indicator of the growing poverty plaguing many farmers in Sri Lanka, […]
When Nathkulasinham Nesemalhar took a flight from Colombo to Muscat in March she believed the boarding pass she clutched in her hand was her golden ticket to a better life after decades of war where she lost everything, including her husband. The 54-year-old widow from Sri Lanka’s former war zone had been promised work as […]