The United Arab Emirates (UAE) is home to around 2.8 million Indian nationals, of which 60-70 per cent are blue-collar workers. The UAE has the second largest community of Indians, after Saudi Arabia. But the exact number of Indian blue-collar workers there is not available as the UAE authorities do not share such data with […]
Migrant workers have been stuck in the Gulf country for over 18 months, without food, water or adequate shelter “For the last 18 months, Embassy officials and ministers are coming and going. We hear the same words. We will be rescued soon, help is on the way, no need to worry… But now we are […]
Despite recent reforms in the country, Doha’s restrictive employment policies continue to challenge migrant mothers and split families On an average day, Faith sends nearly 100 messages on WhatsApp to her children and family back home in Nairobi, Kenya. “It’s cheaper than calling,” she said. “And I’m only working in Qatar to support them.” In […]
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 […]
Bangladeshi migrant workers experienced the worst year in 2017, with around 3,500 dead bodies sent back from different countries, the highest number ever in a single year. Most of these migrant workers who died due to “heart attacks and strokes” were between the ages of 30 and 45 — an unlikely age to have such […]
Manjusha OM, an Indian domestic worker from Kerala, returned home empty-handed from Saudi Arabia, with a shattered mind and bruises on her body, after working like a slave for eight months. She was beaten up by her Arab employer for ‘disobedience’ during her 20-hour-long duty and had to eat from garbage bins to keep herself […]
Nepali migrant workers are trapped in a vicious cycle of debt and exploitation due to a failure by authorities to crack down on recruitment firms that charge illegally high fees for jobs abroad, human rights group Amnesty International said on Monday. Wages sent back by an estimated four million Nepalis – mainly employed working in […]
In the Churu city of Rajasthan, India, a family of 10 is desperately worried. Six years ago, Yousuf Ali*, the third of eight siblings, took a loan to leave for Riyadh to work as part of Empower Contracting, a subsidiary of the construction business Saudi Binladen Group. The dream to support his family did not […]
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, […]