AT GROUND ZERO, ON NOBODY'S RADAR
Jaya Menon
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TNN
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Tyrannized by extremists as well as employers, Indian migrant workers in conflict zones are nobody's concern. The govt has no data on them, their families have no means to help and the agents have fled
Jency James and Sini Gilcend do not have access to newspapers or televisions at the hospitals in Tikrit and Ramadi where they work as nurses. But their families back home in Kerala and Tamil Nadu do, and they get a vivid picture of the brutality of the sectarian Shia-Sunni Muslim war raging in Iraq.Tikrit, Saddam Hussein's hometown, fell to the rebels on June 11, amidst horrifying reports of mass executions. Ramadi, 70 miles west of Baghdad and a base for Sunni extremism, could well be the rebels' next big conquest. But the two nurses say they won't return home until they make enough to pay back debts.
As members of the militant Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) continued their relentless push towards Baghdad, the fate of several Indians hangs in balance. Amnesty International India has claimed that “several hundred Indian nationals may be stranded in Najaf, unable to return home because their employer refuses to return their passports“.
The bigger tragedy is that even the Indian government does not seem to know exactly how many migrant workers are currently in Iraq. There is hardly any comprehensive data on migrant workers, particularly in strife torn countries. “We don't have information on how many unskilled or semi-skilled workers from India are out there in conflict areas like Syria, Libya or Afghanistan,“ says Irudaya Rajan, a scholar at the Centre for Development Studies in Thiruvananthapuram.
On June 3, when a Catholic missionary Alexis Prem Kumar from Kodaikanal was abducted by Taliban militants in Zenda Jan district of Afghanistan, the news was first announced by a police official of Herat province.
A rough estimate by the Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs (MOIA) puts the current migrant worker outflow at 25 million (2.5 crore). “But, it could well be 30 million or more,“ says Raja. A member of the MOIA's research unit on international migration, he has worked on a survey of mi grant workers in Kerala, Goa, Punjab and Gujarat.
The team is currently working on Tamil Nadu and data for these states, with high migrant outflow, is yet to be released.
With poverty driving more and more desperate unskilled workers out of the country and into conflict areas, there is need for a national migration survey . The MOIA website lists several countries for which it provides data on Indian expatriates. But they don't include `sensitive' nations and it is unclear if this data includes all migrant workers and if it has been updated lately .
“When racial violence broke out against Indian students in Australia (May 2009), there was a virtual scramble to find out how many of our students were there,“ says Rajan. An Indian government investigation said there were more than 150 cases of assaults, many of them racist, against Indian students in Australia that year alone.
Experts have also pointed to the weak framework of the Indian Emigration Act 1983, governing migrants. The ongoing Iraq crisis has thrown up other issues -the role of recruiting agencies and the borderline trafficking cases. The MOIA is likely to restart work on an emigration management draft bill that makes it mandatory for manpower agencies to register and get accreditation. Relatives of the nurses from Kerala and Tamil Nadu stuck in Iraq say agents have shut shop in Kochi and disappeared. Migrant workers tend to be prime tar gets for rebel groups so it is imperative to maintain a database about them. Take for instance the 39 construction workers from India taken hostage by the ISIS in Iraq. “Mi grant workers are often amongst the most vulnerable as they are ill-prepared, don't speak the local language or share the host country's culture,“ points out Benjamin Wahren, deputy head of regional delega tion, International Committee of the Red Cross, New Delhi.
The International Organization for Mi gration has evolved a module for training migrants in contingency planning based on the experience of its workers in the Libyan civil war in 2011. “We have an ongoing pro gramme to brief soldiers going on peace keeping missions. We could also think of contributing to better preparing civil ians in a conflict area,“ says Wahren.
R Migrant workers are often bullied and forced to stay back in adverse con ditions by ruthless employers. Take the example of Shravan Kumar, 33, from Sikar, Rajasthan. He worked as a painter in Najaf, the holy city about 100 miles south of Baghdad, and reportedly died of a heart attack on June 24. His roommate told his family that Kumar became agitated when he was told by his employer that he could not leave the company premises because of the ongoing war. On June 20, he collapsed after throwing up blood.
A lot of migrant workers from Punjab are not on anyone's radar -they enter Iraq illegally from Dubai. Reports say some of them have been locked up by their employers and refused permission to leave.
These stories have a chance of ending happily only if employee data is available to local missions. Irfan Jaffrey can vouch for this. The Mumbai-based techie was abducted by Sudanese rebels in Darfur and released after 94 days of captivity earlier this month. Says R Ganapathi, chairman of Trigyn Technologies, and Jaffrey's em ployer: “It does help for employers to reach out to the local mission and provide details of their employees, like we did. The pain that families go through...But we had com plete faith in the (Indian) embassy and a prayer on our lips.“
As members of the militant Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) continued their relentless push towards Baghdad, the fate of several Indians hangs in balance. Amnesty International India has claimed that “several hundred Indian nationals may be stranded in Najaf, unable to return home because their employer refuses to return their passports“.
The bigger tragedy is that even the Indian government does not seem to know exactly how many migrant workers are currently in Iraq. There is hardly any comprehensive data on migrant workers, particularly in strife torn countries. “We don't have information on how many unskilled or semi-skilled workers from India are out there in conflict areas like Syria, Libya or Afghanistan,“ says Irudaya Rajan, a scholar at the Centre for Development Studies in Thiruvananthapuram.
On June 3, when a Catholic missionary Alexis Prem Kumar from Kodaikanal was abducted by Taliban militants in Zenda Jan district of Afghanistan, the news was first announced by a police official of Herat province.
A rough estimate by the Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs (MOIA) puts the current migrant worker outflow at 25 million (2.5 crore). “But, it could well be 30 million or more,“ says Raja. A member of the MOIA's research unit on international migration, he has worked on a survey of mi grant workers in Kerala, Goa, Punjab and Gujarat.
The team is currently working on Tamil Nadu and data for these states, with high migrant outflow, is yet to be released.
With poverty driving more and more desperate unskilled workers out of the country and into conflict areas, there is need for a national migration survey . The MOIA website lists several countries for which it provides data on Indian expatriates. But they don't include `sensitive' nations and it is unclear if this data includes all migrant workers and if it has been updated lately .
“When racial violence broke out against Indian students in Australia (May 2009), there was a virtual scramble to find out how many of our students were there,“ says Rajan. An Indian government investigation said there were more than 150 cases of assaults, many of them racist, against Indian students in Australia that year alone.
Experts have also pointed to the weak framework of the Indian Emigration Act 1983, governing migrants. The ongoing Iraq crisis has thrown up other issues -the role of recruiting agencies and the borderline trafficking cases. The MOIA is likely to restart work on an emigration management draft bill that makes it mandatory for manpower agencies to register and get accreditation. Relatives of the nurses from Kerala and Tamil Nadu stuck in Iraq say agents have shut shop in Kochi and disappeared. Migrant workers tend to be prime tar gets for rebel groups so it is imperative to maintain a database about them. Take for instance the 39 construction workers from India taken hostage by the ISIS in Iraq. “Mi grant workers are often amongst the most vulnerable as they are ill-prepared, don't speak the local language or share the host country's culture,“ points out Benjamin Wahren, deputy head of regional delega tion, International Committee of the Red Cross, New Delhi.
The International Organization for Mi gration has evolved a module for training migrants in contingency planning based on the experience of its workers in the Libyan civil war in 2011. “We have an ongoing pro gramme to brief soldiers going on peace keeping missions. We could also think of contributing to better preparing civil ians in a conflict area,“ says Wahren.
R Migrant workers are often bullied and forced to stay back in adverse con ditions by ruthless employers. Take the example of Shravan Kumar, 33, from Sikar, Rajasthan. He worked as a painter in Najaf, the holy city about 100 miles south of Baghdad, and reportedly died of a heart attack on June 24. His roommate told his family that Kumar became agitated when he was told by his employer that he could not leave the company premises because of the ongoing war. On June 20, he collapsed after throwing up blood.
A lot of migrant workers from Punjab are not on anyone's radar -they enter Iraq illegally from Dubai. Reports say some of them have been locked up by their employers and refused permission to leave.
These stories have a chance of ending happily only if employee data is available to local missions. Irfan Jaffrey can vouch for this. The Mumbai-based techie was abducted by Sudanese rebels in Darfur and released after 94 days of captivity earlier this month. Says R Ganapathi, chairman of Trigyn Technologies, and Jaffrey's em ployer: “It does help for employers to reach out to the local mission and provide details of their employees, like we did. The pain that families go through...But we had com plete faith in the (Indian) embassy and a prayer on our lips.“
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