Kerala's Reverse Migration Headache

The mass reverse migration from the gulf of non-resident keralites will challenge chief minister pinarayi vijayan’s optimism that their return is, in fact, an opportunity

- Jeemon Jacob

Dilip Narayanan Nampi’s successful career in Dubai sank abruptly this March when the MNC he worked for handed him the pink slip in the face of losses borne during the coronavirus lockdown. The 40-year-old IT engineer, who is in Dubai since 2003, is hunting for a new job; his wife’s income, as an HR executive, won’t be enough, he says, to pull through in one of the world’s most expensive cities. “The pandemic has changed Dubai overnight. The barriers of class and status in the expat community have vanished. We are all at the mercy of the disease,” says a distraught Nampi.

With hirings in deep freeze, the clamour to give preference to locals in jobs growing and the oil economies of the Gulf region in a bind, Nampi’s chances of a bounce-back look bleak. Among his desperate options could be a return to his native land Kerala—a difficult choice that thousands of non-resident Keralites (NRKs) are contemplating as the COVID crisis pushes their lives into deep economic uncertainty on foreign land. At last count, 442,000 NRKs from across the world had registered online with the Kerala government’s NORKA (Non-Resident Keralites Affairs) department, expressing a desire to return to the state, some of them for good.

The first batch of NRKs—370 people from the UAE—landed on the evening of May 7 in Kochi and Kozhikode, under the Indian government’s mission to evacuate its citizens stranded in various countries. At the time of going to press, a flight from Bahrain was slated to reach Kochi on May 8; a flight each from Kuwait and Oman were scheduled to arrive the day after. Air India plans to run 64 flights from around the Gulf region in the first week of the evacuation.

THE END OF A DREAM?