{"id":10947,"date":"2018-08-09T18:24:51","date_gmt":"2018-08-09T18:24:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=10947"},"modified":"2018-08-09T18:24:51","modified_gmt":"2018-08-09T18:24:51","slug":"tales-of-suffering-continue-to-pour-in-from-indian-workers-in-qatar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=10947","title":{"rendered":"Tales of suffering continue to pour in from Indian workers in Qatar"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

\nNEW DELHI: Durlal Singh sold his farmland to secure a ticket to Qatar in 2015. Three years on, the 35-year old carpenter from the Barnala district of the north Indian state of Punjab, regrets that choice.<\/p>\n

\u201cSince January, I have not received payment from the construction company. I have been working there for the last three years. It\u2019s the worst crisis I have faced in my life,\u201d Singh told Arab News from his labor camp in Qatar. \u201cThere have been only assurances and nothing else. I have stopped sending money back home because I am earning hardly anything. But I am managing somehow to survive and hoping that things will improve.\u201d<\/p>\n

Singh went on to describe his \u201csub-human\u201d situation.<\/p>\n

\u201cElectricity is available only during the daytime,\u201d he explained. \u201cWe struggle to get water and other basic amenities. My situation will not improve until I get a regular job and the perks and payments that are overdue to me and other workers.\u201d<\/p>\n

Singh said the Indian Embassy in Qatar had \u201cassured every help\u201d but that its words were \u201ca formality\u201d and he had received little \u201cgenuine support.\u201d<\/p>\n

Surinder Singh, who comes from the Jalandhar district in Punjab, is equally distraught. The 60-year-old mechanic has been in Qatar for over 15 years, and said he has never faced the kind of \u201chumiliation\u201d that he now faces.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt this stage in life, working as a part-time mechanic does not fetch you much money and you cannot earn enough to send money back home,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

For the past five months, Singh claimed, he has not received his agreed salary from the construction company he works for. His earnings, currently, are dependent on the number of days he is given work.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you don\u2019t have a regular contract in the company, you are not earning good money and you are not getting any perks,\u201d he said. \u201cThanks to some local charities run by expatriates, I am managing to eat and survive. But if you see the living conditions, it is really miserable. I hope the situation improves as has been promised by the authorities here.\u201d<\/p>\n

The story of Uppu Tripuati from the southern Indian state of Telangana is similarly depressing. Last year, Tripuati was jailed for five months. He was arrested because the company where he worked as a mechanic had failed to properly implement legally required safety measures.<\/p>\n

\u201cI ended up spending five months in jail through no fault of my own,\u201d the 34-year-old said. \u201cMy company refused to bail me out and it\u2019s only because of the efforts of the Indian community that I managed to get some money together so I could be released.\u201d<\/p>\n

Getting out of jail was not the end of Tripuati\u2019s troubles however. Since his release, he said, \u201cLife has not been smooth. The financial burden has gone up and job uncertainty has increased. My wife complains that I am not sending her money.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rema George, a 42-year-old social worker and political activist, visited Qatar last month. She went there after hearing about the plight of workers from the southern Indian state of Kerala, her home.<\/p>\n

\u201cI had heard that more than 1,200 people had lost their jobs and had not been paid for many months,\u201d she said. \u201cTo get a sense of the situation I went to Qatar. I was not officially allowed to visit the labor camps. I was pursued wherever I went and it was tough to meet the workers inside their homes. However, I managed to (do that) and hear their grievances first hand.\u201d<\/p>\n

George said she had written a letter to the Indian Embassy in Qatar \u201clisting all the problems confronting the workers there and they agreed to look into the matter.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIn Qatar, there are more than 50 labor camps and many of them don\u2019t have basic amenities. These have cropped up after (it) won the bid to host the 2022 FIFA World Cup. Many laborers are being kept illegally in the camps despite their visas having expired,\u201d George claimed.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

NEW DELHI: Durlal Singh sold his farmland to secure a ticket to Qatar in 2015. Three years on, the 35-year old carpenter from the Barnala district of the north Indian state of Punjab, regrets that choice. \u201cSince January, I have not received payment from the construction company. I have been working there for the last…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":10948,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10947","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-middle_east_news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10947","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10947"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10947\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10948"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10947"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10947"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10947"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}