An immigrant’s travails highlight the challenges that workers stranded overseas face while trying to return home
Hyderabad: Durgam Dastagiri spent nearly five months trying to get thrown into a Saudi jail. It was the only way he could go home.
A slight, bird-like man with a neatly groomed moustache, Dastagiri is one of approximately 4.5 million Indian workers who have moved to countries in the Gulf Cooperation Council, or GCC (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates), to take up semi-skilled jobs to support families in Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. Sometimes, the job is all that is promised. More often, it isn’t. And, because of the unique, almost repressive laws governing immigrant workers in most West Asian countries, many find themselves stranded.
“We’ve had cases of people who have been stuck not just for four and five years, but 18, 20 years. We ask them why they stayed so long and they say they didn’t know what else to do,” says Mehru Vesuvala, who works at Migrant Workers Protection Society in Bahrain. “They tried to leave and found that they could not.” Read More
No comments:
Post a Comment