Diplomatic Challenge for India for its Human Resource

The kingdom of Saudi Arabia has nearly 3.2 million Indians, as of September 2017, spread across the kingdom, accounting for the largest population of the Indian passport holders out of the country. This is more than half of the six million that were estimated Indian migrants in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Oman. Almost 70 per cent of the Indians are blue collar workers in Saudi Arabia. Of them, the rough estimates suggest, nearly 74000 are women employed as the domestic labourers, nursing aides, doctors and the teachers. Most of the Indians to the Saudi Arabia come from Telangana, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, UP and the Punjab. Over the years some of the women domestic helps have brought home tales of the ill treatment and the harassment. Last year in June, 29 year old Dhatchayani Uma Shankar broke her back reportedly after attempting to escape her abusive employers in Dammam in the eastern Saudi Arabia, only a month after joining the work. 6 months prior to this, another Indian maid Kasthuri Munirathinam lost an arm in an alleged bid to flee her employers.

The Saudi authorities have refuted these reports. The authorities of the India claim that such types of the cases are only a few and that there is a good institutional framework of the cooperation with the Saudi government on the labour and the manpower. Since 2013, 1336 complaints from the housemaids were received by the Indian mission, an average of around 250 per year. The government sources say 1329 maids in the distress have been repatriated in the last 4 years. “We have built a robust response system over the last 2 years. We have launched Madad electronic portal to address such type of the critical issues and the grievances. Our Twitter accounts are active and we receive email and the walk-ins by the complainants,” Ahmad Javed, Indian ambassador told recently from Riyadh. The two countries are bound by the 2014 agreement on the labour cooperation for the domestic service workers recruitment (DSW). Each Indian entering Saudi for the work has to register officially with the Saudi Labour Ministry and the Indian mission. The DSW lays down the rules like the working hours, holidays, the living conditions of the women domestic helps, among the various others. All the contracts generally have a 2 year engagement with the first vacation permitted after the 1st year or after the 2 years of the work. The practice of a Saudi or an Indian employer depositing a bank guarantee of $2500 against an Indian recruitment has been dispensed with recently. The Indian envoy says most of the complainants are those who came via a 3rd country and are not at all registered under the official DSW route. These type of the people could very well be exploited, may get homesick with in days of the travel or could be subjected to the drastic working hours. The ambassador denies the allegations that his team is non receptive in the cases where an abused person is unable to share the specifics of a location or escapes to the informal shelter built and operated by the Indian mission.

“Sometimes we cannot trace a call in a foreign country as we are an embassy, not an investigative agency. You have to give at least some location or the details so that we can help,” says the Indian envoy. The kafala system of the Saudi sponsorship, where the sole and the complete right of allowing a worker to leave the kingdom is to be granted by the sponsor with the help of an exit visa, remains a very huge headache. A maid whose passport has been forcibly withheld by the recruiter can obtain the travel documents from the Indian embassy. But without an exit visa from the sponsor, she cannot step out of the kingdom. The maid who earns about 1500 riyal per month (Rs 26000) could be asked to pay up at least 15000 riyal for an exit visa upon the premature contract termination to cover the investment cost of a sponsor. The Saudi envoy to India Dr Saud AlSati claims his government has already facilitated the return of the workers even without a sponsor visa. The ministry has already established 38 committees throughout the kingdom in order to deal with the various types of the disputes between the employers and their employees including the domestic helps. It has established a direct helpline in the nine languages and an office specially dedicated for providing the support and the protection to the domestic helps. The two countries are now working on an integrated system for the consolidated data of the complaints registered by the employees and the workers. The Indian authorities also claim that the cases of the sexual assault against the maids are exaggerated by the sections in the Indian media. On the basis of the complaints we have received, we take the ones on the sexual assault or the abuse verse seriously, but each of such cases are too few, says the Indian ambassador.