#dnaEdit | Indian worker

plight of 800 laid-off Indian workers, going without food for three days in Saudi Arabia. The Indian embassy in Riyadh and consulate in Jeddah have been asked to serve food to the workers, and ministers of state in the Ministry of External Affairs, Gen VK Singh and MJ Akbar, have been asked to go and sort out the issues. Government has done what it should in the situation, but what is required is a better grasp of the problem of the Indian worker in the Gulf Arab countries. Most of the governments in this region have fair and reasonable labour laws but the private employers never seem to implement them. The wages are no wages because they are not aligned with the cost of living in those countries. But it does not matter to the poor workers because for them what matters more is the exchange rate of the Indian rupee for every dirham, rial or dinar they earn there, and all that they want to do is to send money even as they work and live in sub-human conditions. Governments in New Delhi and in the Gulf Arab capitals can plead helplessness because the problem is much too widespread, and the awareness about what constitutes minimal working and living conditions, and what the rights of the workers even in the stringently confined context of the laws of those countries, is abysmally low.

Successive governments have rightly celebrated the successes of Indians in countries like the United States, the United Kingdom, Singapore and Australia, but the Indians working in the Gulf Arab countries have been neglected though the remittances from this region is far higher than those from the other places. It would be simplistic to argue that the Indians migrating to the Gulf are from the lower middle class and poor strata of society – there is of course a significant chunk of the middle class too – and therefore they are overlooked by the home as well as the host governments. Secondly, a large number of them happen to be from Kerala, and apart from Kerala politicians, very few political leaders take interests in the affairs of Gulf Indians.

The problem of neglect exists but it is not the real reason for the difficulties and miseries of the Indian workers in the Gulf. The problem lies with the economies and political framework of the Gulf Arab countries. Though many of them make it to the ranks of middle income countries in the world, their economies and their societies are relatively undeveloped. The citizens in these countries live apart from the migrants, with minimal contact with them. Governments in these countries might be solicitous towards India but they do not have an enlightened approach towards the migrant populations in their midst. Indians communities live in social and psychological, apart from economic, ghettoes. The migrants enjoy no rights as such because there are no established and recognised rights systems as such in these countries. The change then has to come from the Gulf Arab governments and societies as to how they want to deal with the migrants who contribute to their economies. There has to be an integration of sorts so that when there are problems they can be sorted out between the migrant workers and the local authorities, and without the intervention of the Indian government. The inhibitions and fears that the Gulf Arab societies have about the migrants from India and other Asian countries may be natural given the innate conservatism of these countries. But they have to come out of the fragile cocoons and reach out to the migrants so that all of them can prosper