By Shaik Zakeer Hussain, TwoCircles.net,
Bengaluru: Six months ago, when Omar Mukhtar received a phone call from his elder brother, asking him to get ready to pack his bag, the 24 year old young man from Karnataka’s coastal town of Mangalore was overwhelmed with joy.
Omar’s brother works in a construction company in Dammam, Saudi Arabia and was the first of the four siblings to migrate to the oil rich Kingdom almost six years ago. After clearing the family debt and when life felt like it’s all settled down, he started helping his other brothers to emigrate one by one.
“In our part of the town, there are only two things that a man wants to be; businessman or work in the Middle East,” Omar said. Unlike his brothers, he wanted to start his own business. But being born in a lower middle class family, his desire was farfetched and soon realized that he had to put it at bay, at least for some time.
“So I decided to work in Saudi Arabia for a few years and then come back and start some business.”
But unknown to Omar, Middle East had started to go through a radical transformation. The uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya had brought down decades of old oppressive regimes and other countries in the region were going through the same volatile phase. Though Saudi Arabia weathered the first wave of the popular uprisings, but the Monarchy, fearing similar forms of dissent, announced a series of benefits for its citizens, including reforms in its labour laws.
According to a study conducted by the Saudi Central Department of Statistics and Information, the country’s overall unemployment rate stood at 12.2 per cent last year.
Viewing unemployment among nationals as a “long-term strategic challenge that needs to be handled effectively”, the country introduced the Nitaqat programme. The new law made it mandatory for local companies to hire one Saudi national for every 10 migrant workers and deport workers not employed directly by the Saudi citizens who have sponsored their visa. Ironically, the country’s employment is dominated by foreign expats; majority of who are from India, in the ratio of nine in every ten employees.
“Last month, my brother called again, but this time to inform me that my visit has to be cancelled for now,” Omar said disappointingly. He was supposed to search for a job, after arriving in Saudi Arabia, but the new law, he says has made the process excruciatingly difficult. He is now concerned, if his brothers don’t have to face any problems there.
Some 180,000 foreign workers have left the kingdom since April 1 under an amnesty that allowed them to try to sort out their papers or leave without paying a penalty, a Saudi based newspaper reported on Sunday. Frustrated Indonesian workers even set fire to a part of their consulate in Jeddah, expressing their anger at the long wait seeking to correct their status as illegal foreign workers.
The world’s largest oil exporter was a goldmine for millions of workers from across countries like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and other parts of Asia, but changing tides and geostrategic factors have left them all in lurch. As for Omar, he now wants to look for a job here in India and says, if ever things calm down, he would want to try his fortune again.
