The Long Road Home

The return of international migrant workers due to the pandemic is likely to intensify in the coming months, creating additional challenges for india, which is already struggling to help its domestic migrants

- Divya J Shekhar

Martin Xavier describes himself as a “true migrant”. His career trajectory over the last 25 years as an engineer in the oil and gas (O&G) industry has involved moving from one country to another. The 47-yearold spent the last decade working in Kazakhstan, before which he was employed in the Middle East. His international migrant worker status received a sudden jolt in March when he came back home to Mumbai for a family emergency and was unable to return to his place of work. International flights were suspended indefinitely due to the Covid-19 pandemic, and, in April, his company informed him that he had been laid off.

Some of his fellow Indian colleagues met with a similar fate. “I have no clarity about my future. We don’t know when the airports will open up. Even if they do, the O&G industry has been hit because of low crude prices, so we have no idea if companies, both abroad and in India, will have jobs to give. It’s a double whammy,” says Xavier.

One in 20 migrant workers worldwide is Indian, according to the World Economic Forum. India has been among the top origin countries of international migrant laborers since the United Nations (UN) started tracking the roots of these workers in the 1990s. The movement of people, both within and outside the country, soared with the 1991 economic reforms that stressed on globalisation and liberalisation. The ‘Global Migration Report 2020’ brought out by The International Organisation for Migration, a UN agency, says India has the largest number of migrant labourers living abroad, at 17.5 million, followed by Mexico at 11.8 million and China at 10.7 million.