There are 4-5 million Indian workers in GCC countries and of them UAE has alone nearly 1.8 million Indian workers. Many people from my own country, Bangladesh, also go to Middle East to earn their livelihood and sometimes in the media; we can see sad tales of exploitation for these people. Most of the people who go to the Middle East to work are not highly educated nor do they come from rich background. If they suffer exploitation they cannot go to court too. I am happy that the Indian government is now pushing for a memorandum of understanding (MoU) on labor with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Oman, Bahrain and Qatar and Malaysia.
Indian government will try to arrange more training for people who wish to go abroad to work. Indian government will also try that Indian workers in these countries get fair treatment and if there is any exploitation the governments of these countries will look into this matter. This kind of institutional arrangement will surely help Indian workers in the Middle East a lot and India must take this issue more seriously as remittance sent by these workers from the Middle East is now an important source of foreign exchange for the Indian economy.
I wish that Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka sign similar deal with GCC countries as they too have significant number of workers working in the Middle East.
What do you think?
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Thanks God that though it is late, the Indian government has realized the problem of the worker who are working in the GCC countries and making important foreign exchange for their country. Yes, I agree with you that the workers heeding towards middleeast are not educatited even in some cases, they have no primary education too. So a person living in another country can not do anything if he is victimized by anybody. So, the idea of giving training of Indian govenment is praiseworthy.
The other Southasian countries like Bangladesh, Pakistan, Srilanka cna also take this idea as a model as they have a lot people in GCC countries.
Thank you for your well-informed article.
Posted by: Biplob Kishore Deb | May 25, 2006 4:24 AM | Permalink to Comment