Lowering minimum wage terms may put Indian workers in Gulf at disadvantage

The referral wage is meant to protect migrant workers from employers abroad, but changing the terms could end up hurting them.

Indian migrant workers, hit by the pandemic-led downturn, are confronted with a new challenge--a reduction in the Minimum Referral Wages (MRW) mandated by the government to protect them from exploitative employers abroad. MRW applies to poorly educated, low skilled blue-collar workers who have to produce an Emigration Check Required (ECR) passport when they seek to migrate to 18 countries for work.

The countries seeking ECR clearance include the Gulf Cooperation Council members and others like Sudan, Indonesia, Malaysia and Jordan. But MRW is most critical in the Gulf, a favoured destination for Indian migrants, due to the lack of minimum