Indian migrant workers harassed in Saudi Arabia

Patna: Over a dozen poor villagers who went to Saudi Arabia in search of jobs are now being harassed. Their relatives have urged state government’s labor department to get them freed from the slavery. All of them were absorbed in work by the Bin Laden group of companies, alleged without any pay.

Such reports of the migrants facing problems in other countries are very often. Still there is a big craze in people of migrating to other countries for job. Most of the unskilled & semi-skilled people migrated to the Gulf countries. Estimation has been done that 60,000 people from Bihar are going each year to other countries for petty jobs. Northern Bihar residents are famous for sending migrants & there are several districts from at least one person from each family have migrated mostly through unsafe means.

“The 2008 reports show that 2.8 lakh people migrated to different countries which comprised mainly low skill emigrants,” said program coordinator of International Organization for Migration (IOM) Nitin Kumar at a workshop on Private-Public Partnership for promoting safe migration & combat human trafficking.

He said apart from Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu & Kerala are the major states of migration. “There is very few recruitment agencies registered in Bihar & the recruitment is mainly done by the unauthentic middleman,” said Kumar. It was emerged at the workshop that India is a labor sending country and mainly its labor force go to the Gulf and South East Asian countries. India also continues to be the largest recipient of transmittal in 2010 with the figure rising from $49.6 billion in 2009 to $55 billion.

But the safe migration is the major issue otherwise the migrants are vulnerable to trafficking and smuggling. "Migrants who move on their own free will may become victim of smuggling and may be end up in a trafficked situation. They are prone to suffer abuse at the hands of their smugglers or exploited by their employers," said IOM program manager PNS Malathy.

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