Dreams gone sour: Indians who work with Bin Laden group of companies harassed

PATNA: Over a dozen poor villagers of Buxar district who went to Saudi Arabia for job a few months back are terribly harassed. Their life has turned miserable and they want to return but not able to move back. Their relatives have urged state government's labour department to get them freed from the slavery. All of them taken through middlemen had been employed with some facilities under Bin Laden group of companies, allegedly without pay.

Such reports of migrants facing hardships come quite often. Still there is a big craze of going abroad among the semi-skilled or unskilled people mostly to Gulf through unsafe migration. An estimated 60,000 people from Bihar go to other countries every year for petty jobs. Northern Bihar districts are known for sending migrants and there are several districts from at least one person from each family has migrated mostly through unsafe mode.

"The 2008 statistics shows that 8.5 lakh migrations were recorded from India to different countries which comprised mainly low skill emigrants," said programme coordinator of International Organisation for Migration (IOM) Nitin Kumar at a workshop on Public Private Partnership for promoting safe migration and combat human trafficking.

He said apart from Bihar, UP, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Kerala are the major states of migration. "There are very few recruitment agencies registered in Bihar and the recruitment is mainly done by the unauthentic middlemen," said Kumar.

It was emerged at the workshop that India is a labour sending country and mainly its labour force go to the Gulf and South East Asian countries. India also continues to be the largest recipient of remittance 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 programme manager PNS Malathy.