Nirjana Sharma

The protracted wait of family members to receive the bodies of their loved ones who died in Saudi Arabia will be over soon. The government is mulling ferrying the bodies of Nepali migrant workers who lost their lives in the Gulf country.

According to government officials, a high level task force comprising representatives of the Ministry of foreign affairs, finance, the department of Foreign Employment and Foreign Employment Commission Board; will be flying to Saudi Arabia to lobby with the government of Saudi Arabia to get back those workers’ dead bodies that date back 18 months to two years, within a couple of months. The taskforce will be led by either the Minister for Labour and Transport Management (MoLTM) or a Secretary of the ministry, according to MoLTM Under Secretary Krishna Hari Pushkar Karna. “The bodies of 50 workers are at Riyadh but we have estimated around 150 such bodies are waiting for the ‘exit visa’ from Saudi,” said Karna. “As the law is very precarious regarding migrant workers in Saudi Arabia, it is the only country that requires exit visa for granting permission to ferry out dead bodies to another country.”

As most of the migrant workers had reached there with illegal documents, they do not figure in government statistics in either Saudia Arabia or Nepal, thus creating severe complications in bring these back home, said Karna.

The directives of the Foreign Employment Regulations, that pave the path for the expenditure to bring back the bodies, will be passed within two days. “Once the directives get the green signal, the government can spend the amount from Foreign Employment Commission Board (FECB) which will be the source to spend on bringing the dead bodies back to Nepal,” said Karna who is also assistant spokesperson for MoLTM. The government mission at Saudi Arabia, which was recently established for the welfare of Nepali migrant workers will study the overall status of Nepali workers who have reached there—either documented or undocumented.

The government official said Harischandra Ghimire, Deputy Chief of the mission, will ascertain the number of deaths, situation of the workers gone there using legal and illegal documents and the budget required for carrying them back to Nepal.

If statistics at the Nepal Embassy at Riyadh are anything to go by, there are roughly 500,000 Nepali unskilled labourers currently working in Saudi Arabia. Among them 20 percent are illegal and trapped in  critical working conditions. Other data of the Department of Foreign Employment show that 46,906 legal workers went to Saudi Arabia between August 2010-mid April of 2011 only.

Published on: 19 May 2011 | The Kathmandu Post