Government as job contractor

The govt's plan to send Indians abroad as labourers is seen as a practical acknowledgment of the constraints in the domestic economy. However, the larger issue here is an ethical one

After the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war on October 7, 2023, the number of tourists to Israel fell precipitately to about 39,000 in November from a monthly average of over 300,000. This is notable only because Israel has been unusually war-proof as a foreign tourist destination. Every year, a range of overseas airlines delivered thousands of visitors to the historic sites of the three Abrahamic religions despite the constant background riff of mutual terrorism and violent displacement. If flights have been cancelled now, things must be pretty bad. So it says something about the state of India’s northern heartland that construction workers and labourers are willing to run the high risk of grievous bodily harm by rushing in their thousands to sign up for jobs in the holy land last month.

This rush is the result of ads by Uttar Pradesh and Haryana for 10,000 positions each for construction workers in Israel in response to a request from Tel Aviv, which is reportedly facing a labour shortage. The process for the initial recruitment of 5,000 workers is being overseen by an Israeli team. Some labourers who turned up for the Israeli draft said they had weighed the risks against the opportunity of earning almost four times more than they would for equivalent work in India.

This move by Haryana and UP foreshadow a larger exercise planned by the government of India to sign pacts with various countries (other than traditional buyers in the Gulf) to send Indians to work on farms and in construction and manufacturing. Under this template, India and Israel have signed an agreement for 40,000 workers, mainly to replace Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza whose work permits were cancelled once war broke out. Greece has reportedly approached India for 10,000 seasonal workers on their farms and Italy is seeking people for municipal services.

Though the government has pitched the idea as its own, it is not, in fact, new. In 2007, the ministry of overseas Indian affairs had announced policies to extend help to semi-skilled and skilled labour not just in the Gulf but elsewhere. It had planned bilateral agreements with countries in Europe, south-east Asia and North America to simplify the process for Indian professionals to move to fill labour shortages (the MOIA was a short-lived organisation that lasted the tenure of the United Progressive Alliance and was folded into a division within the Ministry of External Affairs after 2014.) 

The broad idea was to curb illegal immigration and ensure some protection for overseas workers, though the exercise clearly didn’t pan out. This government’s latest plan has been praised as realistic in offering Indians on the lower end of the income and lifestyle curve the chance of a better livelihood. It is said to reflect a practical understanding that India’s economy lacks the absorptive capacity to offer similar wages to large numbers of its people.

This may be a valid point but the bigger issue is an ethical one. It is no secret that overseas blue collar workers are badly treated by host countries. In West Asia, appalled western journalists “discovered” what all South Asians have known for decades when Qatar was awarded World Cup Football hosting rights. Relatively higher wages, in most cases, come with serious human rights violations. In 2016, then foreign minister Sushma Swaraj attracted headlines for her work in helping starving workers laid off by a Jeddah construction company. Desperate unemployed, underpaid and exploited workers who pay touts lakhs for such jobs are well aware of this downside and it is factored into all calculations. 

It is well known that West Asia is not the only place where migrant workers are mistreated. The US is no laggard in this respect, a point that came to public notice in 2011 when a federal US agency sued a company for mistreating and underpaying Indian workers in Mississippi and Texas. More famously, in 2021, Indian workers in New Jersey building a temple owned by a religious figure close to the current dispensation filed a court case in New Jersey for violations of work standards and wages.   

So there are many questions that this latest initiative raises. Should the government participate in a process over which it has little or no control? This issue is particularly moot in the case of the deal with Israel where war is expanding and intensifying in unpredictable ways. Does the government have the wherewithal to track the treatment of workers under such agreements? Is the government in a position to enforce work conditions in a host country when the treatment of labour in India leaves much to be desired? And, finally, can such country-to-country labour drafts address the issue of permanent employment, a key demand in India?

Without this last guarantee, the Indian government runs the risk of becoming little more than a global job contractor. This is not a desirable position to hold for a country that aspires for a bigger international role. Like the Agniveer scheme, this project merely kicks the youth unemployment problem down the road.

The foreign ministry has usefully added an updated list of registered recruiting agents on its website, and a section warning of the dire consequences of paying unregistered touts. That is the most sensible intervention that can be expected in an informal global market that thrives on a key long-term weakness of India’s job market.