REUTERS
Jagtial, Oct 30: On a hot, sleepy afternoon at Kalleda village in Telangana, Laxmi Malaya sat on the porch of her house where the body of her husband Chittam – a daily wage labourer in Dubai – was to be brought the next day.
Chittam, 45, was the second migrant worker from the village to have died in Dubai in September and among the nearly 450 Indian migrant workers shipped home in body bags since 2014. “There were three deaths (of workers from the village) last year as well. We were told Chittam died of a stroke, but he was healthy when he came home for a visit last month,” said Ankathi Gangadhar, the former village head of Kalleda. Another local man, aged 24, died in Dubai last month after suffering a heart attack, villagers said.
Officials of the Telangana state government cite stress, ill health and working in searing temperatures as the most common causes of death and say fatality numbers among migrants who travel to the Gulf from the state have remained stable.
“People discuss these deaths for a week, but then there is no initiative (to offer jobs here) so they keep leaving,” Gangadhar told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. For decades, people have migrated from Telangana – a largely rural region with the tech hub of Hyderabad as its capital – to Indian cities such as Mumbai and to the Gulf, unable to make a living from farming, mainly due to water scarcity. About 10,000 people migrate to the Gulf states every year from Telangana, and about 200 on average from Kalleda, according to government figures.
Most migrants believe they will be able to make good money in Dubai in just a few years – an illusion unscrupulous agents create. “When people started leaving for Gulf states (in the 1980s), this region was reeling from years of drought. They had no option but to migrate,” said Suresh Reddy, a politician from Telangana who has worked on the migration issue. “When they left, there were some economic gains but they paid a heavy price for it – working in inhuman conditions and leaving their families behind.”
Chittam’s annual savings rarely exceeded 12,000 Indian rupees ($185) and he sent home 4,000 to 5,000 rupees every few months. He worked in Dubai for 13 years and visited his wife and two children just five times during that period. “He was planning to return for good next year after making a little more money,” Gangadhar said, as Chittam’s wife Laxmi looked on, numb and impassive.
Ramanna Chitla had worked in Dubai for 16 years when he returned to Jagtial, a town in Telangana, last year, determined to work to stop others from being tricked by agents. “I saw a lot of misery there. Workers were underpaid and poorly treated. They were cheated by their agents with false promises so I thought I would come back and bring a change,” Chitla said.
Over the years, the Indian government and non-governmental groups have received a steady stream of complaints from migrant workers, ranging from non-payment of wages to torture and abuse. Workers often take loans of Rs 50,000 to Rs 100,000 ($750 to $1,500) to pay agents, hoping to earn enough from working as cleaners and as labourers on construction sites to repay the loan, but their salaries rarely match promises.
“They don’t visit doctors when they are unwell to save money,” Chitla said, adding that deaths attributed to ill health are often due to exploitative work conditions. Government figures show there are some 6 million Indian migrants in the six Gulf states of Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Oman. According to official data, more than 30,000 Indian nationals died in the Gulf states between 2005 and 2015.
