IT was 2019. Months before a lethal virus snatched away over five lakh lives in the country. These were the deaths that were accounted for by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare in official documents. But some like Sankapaka Ramalu, who died in Saudi Arabia where he had gone in search of a job, only live on in their families’ memories. Ramalu’s remains have still not been returned to his wife, Lakshmi and son, Harish, who live in a cramped one-bedroom house in Nagireddipur village in Karimnagar district of Telangana. Harish has his own family of two but little means to support them. “We know he has died…but how will our conscience be clear until we see his remains?” asks Lakshmi, her eyes welling up.
Ramalu was one of the roughly half-a-million people in North Telangana who have been forced to move to different parts of the Gulf, including Riyadh, Dubai, Sharjah, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Muscat and Oman, in the past two decades. For these migrants, moving away from home has often entailed seeking refuge in unsafe work environments, being saddled with heavy loans, and in some cases, even death. Reports compiled by the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) estimate that on an average, 15 Indian immigrants die every day in six Gulf countries—Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman and the United Arab Emirates. MEA data says that 33,988 Indians have died in the Gulf since 2014. Telangana accounts for a large chunk of these deaths. However, successive governments have failed to address the needs of gulf migrants in the region, activists say.
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