If one were asked about the common thread that links Kuwait, Iraq, Libya and Yemen, the ready answer till recently would have been that they are all countries that depend hugely on oil production for the lion’s share of the government revenue. With evacuation of foreign nationals, particularly our citizens, currently underway in Yemen, the answer from the Indian perspective would be that they were/are all strife-torn countries from where Indians had to leave in a mighty hurry, at some point of time or the other.
In a state that insists on a special status for the non-resident Keralite (NRK) over and above one as part of the NRI contingent, seen purely from the Malayali perspective, these are countries that our nurses deemed fit to practice their profession in huge numbers and are more often than not among the last bunch of Indians to evacuate even after their lives come under threat, either from internal strife or external occupation. And they stay the last few days out of the fervent hope of recovering the money spent by way of entry cost to agents.
For Malayali nurses, Yemen was among the least preferred destinations, primarily because of the poor salary on offer—Rs 18,000-20,000 a month—but then they would also have invested only Rs 1-1.5 lakh for that job visa and a place to stay and work, so that the meagre monthly remittances would add up to something substantial over a few years, following which they could think of a life of their own.
It was in the 1970s that a push of Malayali nurses, mostly from the central Travancore belt of Tiruvalla-Kottayam, to overseas destinations became visible. The first few years saw them target cities and small towns in Germany, the UK, Italy, Belgium and France. The second wave that followed found nurses heading for the shores of the US, Canada and Australia, and simultaneously a swell began to target Kuwait, Iraq, Qatar, Oman, the UAE and Saudi Arabia. What was initially frowned upon by society soon became a fad when the foreign remittances dramatically transformed the ways and means of hundreds of families where nurses became principal bread-winners.
If the European and American nurses of Indian origin began by earning the equivalent of a few lakh rupees a month, among those in the Gulf countries, the better off are those in Kuwait, Qatar, UAE and Oman in excess of Rs 1 lakh, followed by Saudi Arabia with around Rs 60,000, while fetching up close behind with around Rs 30,000-40,000 were those in Iraq and Libya. If the Yemen story is about the poorest of the strata, Malayalis when they get bitten by overseas employment bug have a propensity to go for the overkill. Thus, it was the hunger for earning in the strong Kuwaiti dinar that acted as the fodder for a job visa scam that recently broke in Kochi where agents were charging an astronomical Rs 25 lakh for a nursing job in Kuwait.
In a state where a teaching job with a Rs 30,000 salary in an aided higher secondary school currently fetches Rs 30-35 lakh as bribe or as the euphemism goes, ‘donation’ to the school management, it’s not surprising that young men and women are willing to risk their lives for jobs that fetch anywhere between Rs 20,000 and Rs 2 lakh a month, based on what they coughed up by way of agent fees. Even as the fierce fighting between the Saudi-led coalition and the Shiite rebels intensifies, in a virtual throwback on a similar evacuation from Iraq and Libya less than a year ago, many Malayali nurses would continue to stay back in war-torn Yemen till the last possible day, in search of maximising their return on investment.
Meanwhile, neither the Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs in Delhi nor the Non-Resident Keralites Affairs (NORKA) that’s been functioning as a full-fledged department of the Kerala government since 1996 with a full-fledged minister seems to have a proper handle on the number of Indians/Keralites working abroad. They seem destined to fumble when war-like situations break out and Indians citizens have to be evacuated. And they wait for the next Iraq/Libya/Yemen to happen.
vinodmathew@newindianexpress.com