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Amnesty International India has said that Indian authorities have failed to act responsibly in the matter of evacuating a group of nurses detained in Iraq.
This was despite the human rights organisation having sounded an alert about the evolving situation there, said Shashikumar Velath, Deputy Chief Executive, Amnesty International India.
New report
He said this while speaking to newspersons after Amnesty India released its latest report, Exploited Dreams: Dispatches from Indian migrant workers in Saudi Arabia.’
Velath also blamed infirmities in the Indian Emigration Act that allowed employers abroad to hide more than what they should reveal about the exact nature of engagement of migrants and working conditions.
Information gathered from Iraq suggests that most of the nurses were not paid their wages for the first four full months of their engagement, Velath said.
Debt overhang
Many had contracted huge loans back home to secure the job and also to fly out of the home country to the new destination.
It would not have been possible for them to give up their jobs and return even in the face of hostile conditions developing around them.
The overhang of debt prevented them from seeking to press for an exit. Because, once home, they would have been hard-pressed to service the loans due to lack of a fall-back mechanism.
Need for regulation
This situation needs to be corrected either through support programmes by the respective State Government or by enacting a new legislation in the place of the outdated Emigration Act.
G Ananthapadmanabhan, Chief Executive of the organisation, said that the conditions of migrant labourers were more or less the same in West Asia, whether in conflict or during peace time.
He picked out Iraq, Saudi Arabia as also Qatar, where thousands of Indian migrant labourers are building the infrastructure for the 2020 FIFA World Cup.
Lack of effective regulation of visa brokers and rogue recruiting agents make them vulnerable to serious human rights abuses, said the new Amnesty International India report.
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