Kuwait expat bill may hurt Odia workforce hard

Bhubaneswar: Seventy per cent of the passengers who flew into the state on special flights during the lockdown, arrived from the Gulf, including Kuwait. But with that country deeming ‘constitutional’ a bill to reduce its Indian expatriate population to only 15% of the total population, it is likely that many of those who returned won’t be going back.
Kuwait, with a population of 4.3 million people, has about 1.45 million Indians.The bill, which now needs to be enacted into law, will see around eight lakh Indians heading home if implemented. A large chunk of them will be Odisha natives, sources said.
Of the 2,722 people who returned to Odisha from abroad during the lockdown, the highest of 1,146 came from the UAE. Another large set of people came back from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Oman. As many as 735 people came from non-Gulf countries including 174 people from the US.
The special flights arrived in the state between May 12 and June 20. As many as 14 flights brought back stranded persons during this period. On June 20, the Odia community in Bahrain helped fly back 150 stranded workers to Bhubaneswar. They coordinated with the state government and Air India for the special flight.
Umi Daniel, a researcher of migration trends, said the large number of workers returning from the Gulf countries showed that the Odia community had a strong presence there, especially in the sectors of construction and ancillary activities like plumbing, electrical works and fittings.
“The workers mostly hail from the south-coastal and coastal districts of Ganjam, Kendrapada, Bhadrak, Jajpur, Khurda, Nayagarh, Cuttack and Jagatsinghpur. Some of them work seasonally, while others work in a project-based manner,” he said.
In the first week of June, petroleum minister Dharmendra Pradhan had written to his civil aviation counterpart Hardeep Singh Puri to facilitate direct evacuation of Odias stranded in the Gulf. He had said the Centre had taken the initiative of flying back Indian nationals under the Vande Bharat Mission.
On May 3, too, Pradhan had interacted with the Odia community members staying in the Gulf and had promised to take up their request for direct repatriation to Bhubaneswar.