Sunanda K. Datta-Ray | Do More To Keep Indians Who Work Abroad Safer

It’s a huge relief that 3.75 lakh Indian workers have returned from West Asia since the US-Israeli war on Iran began, with only seven casualties. But then, Indians are not fighters. The risks they take are quite different.

With over 35 million people abroad, India has the world's largest diaspora with significant populations in the Gulf, North America, the Arab peninsula, Britain and Southeast Asia. Their estimated annual income of $730 billion accounts for the world’s highest remittance figure.

The community’s generally passive role in global conflicts may have done some damage to its prestige. Yet, some good may come from the interaction if the “Viksit Bharat” of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s dreams shows that as a result of the reforms now being undertaken, Indian wage-earners in the hot and dusty Gulf, for instance, are no longer dismissed as only “foreign workers” -- the term for men and women who labour in distant lands to shore up New Delhi’s foreign exchange reserves.

I once asked our high commissioner in Singapore (where I then lived) during a crisis over “foreign workers” how many Indians were involved. “How would I know?” was his callous retort. That indifference was borne out when I happened to be nominated to a New Delhi committee on awards for “foreign workers”. The committee chairman and most highly-placed members suggested that awards, if any, should go to India’s diplomatic representatives, who, incidentally, are entitled to duty-free loot.

The attitude isn’t at all surprising. Colonial officials argued in the nineteenth century that Indians didn’t object to white supremacy because the European rulers were seen as only an additional topmost layer in the varna caste hierarchy. With the Indian Foreign Service officers slipping into the role of entitled ruler after Independence, millions of uneducated Indians identified the new elite as the latest dwija born to command so that “foreign workers” who contributed most of the $135 billion remittances that India received in 2024 saw no objection to a status quo that goes back to the Indian Emigration Act of 1859 forbidding Assam’s tea plantation labourers from leaving their gardens without the permission of employers, usually white, whose interests were paramount.

The external affairs ministry has since drafted the Overseas Mobility (Facilitation and Welfare) Bill, 2025, to end this exploitation, which continues despite the 1983 Emigration Act which established a “Protector of Emigrants” and introduced welcome sweeping changes.

Migration to West Asia has soared since then. Most of the 10 million Indian workers abroad are blue-collar workers. Many suffer gross rights violations. India argues vehemently but not very convincingly that it is not interested in exporting manpower. Such commerce is even more demeaning when the manpower is untrained. But there is a certain satisfaction in increasing repatriable profits. Indian entrepreneurs are also shrewd enough to detect the advantages of exporting hospital carers to Malaysia, builders to Dubai and medical staff to Northern Ireland.

Drafting the new law was an opportunity to uphold the rights of employees and ensure their continued ability to contribute to India’s prosperity. A new, opaque bureaucratic body -- the Overseas Mobility and Welfare Council -- will now be responsible for all aspects of emigration. The Director-General of Overseas Mobility, similar in position to the Protector-General of Emigrants, will have 16 offices across India, and can grant and revoke the licenses of recruitment agents.

While admitting both the scope and need for effective reform, some analysts still find the new law’s wording ambiguous and anomalous. It might not live up to expectations grounded in the growing labour shortages of developed and wealthy countries, whose native-born workers may be reluctant to take up hazardous jobs. Underlying Indian acquiescence in the system, even after reforms, is the hope that workers migrating to other countries will help to reduce the unemployment crisis at home. That alone can explain why the external affairs ministry has signed labour mobility agreements with no fewer than 20 countries since 2018.

It is wise, of course, to facilitate labour mobility but the terms and conditions of employment are of paramount importance. India’s acknowledgement that its workers are exploited lends special importance to the question of rights and duties. Since jobs at any cost would defeat the purpose of new legislation introducing reforms, the law must commit itself to protecting the rights and dignity of Indians abroad. This calls for relevant and comprehensive inspection of working conditions, constant supervision and insurance policies based on the recorded experience of millions of people so that workers are not just passive beneficiaries of the law.

Problems are best solved when tackled at source and not treated as distant extraneous occurrences of questionable relevance. Licensed recruitment agents in our major cities rely on a network of unregistered sub-agents for workers who take up difficult jobs abroad. The available data shows that while 44 per cent of recruitment agents were concentrated in Delhi and Mumbai, only five per cent were based in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, even though these states accounted for 55 per cent of all emigration clearances issued in 2024. Since low-income workers usually hold passports that call for emigration checks when the holder travels abroad on an employment visa, the Protector of Emigrants has ample opportunity to inspect, advise and, if necessary, intervene.

Another complexity is that licensed recruiters do not reach workers directly. There is a chain of intermediaries, with each link adding a charge that is passed down to the individual worker. Although the government has capped such recruitment service charges at Rs 30,000, it is no secret that an overseas appointment usually costs up to five times that amount. That means that workers are in debt, almost always to non-institutional sources, before seeing a job offer. Moreover, recruiters are often their only source of information about overseas jobs, giving them an advantage in a market with an excess of workers. No wonder many aspiring applicants are at the mercy of unscrupulous recruiters.

The globally recognised “employer pays principle”, where all recruitment costs are borne by the employer, might save workers from the tentacles of a vicious black economy. We need more state recruiters, more efficient and honest supervision at every stage, and an attitudinal change towards men and women who venture abroad to earn for the nation. Ideally, of course, the system of indentured labour should be thrown out lock, stock and barrel, and every effort made to expand manufacturing and employment at home. While that long-term objective is pursued, diasporic employment must be tolerated as a short-term necessity, and nothing more.