RIYADH, 7 February — Review of recruitment procedures, rehabilitation of NRIs on their return to India, voting rights and wages were among the issues studied by a high-level committee on Indian diaspora that has arrived here as part of a fact-finding tour of countries which host large numbers of Indian workers.
"Recruitment practices need to be assessed and analyzed. The idea is to ensure justice to all the people," Dr. L.M. Singhvi, an eminent jurist and head of the High Level Committee on Indian Diaspora, told a press conference here yesterday.
The press conference, held at the Indian Embassy, was attended by other committee members, J.R. Hiremath and Baleshwar Agarwal. India's Ambassador Talmiz Ahmad and Zikr-ur-Rahman, first secretary at the Indian Embassy, were also present.
The high-level committee, set up by India's Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, is the first initiative of its kind to study the problems of the Indian workers in the Gulf states and elsewhere in Europe, Australia, South Africa, the Caribbean and North America.
The recommendations of the committee, constituting the "legislative blueprint", will be submitted to the prime minister. The follow-up action will be through the Ministry of External Affairs which will release the findings to its diplomatic missions abroad, Ambassador Talmiz Ahmad said.
Dr. Singhvi said the committee had met with a large cross-section of the Indian community. It visited four labor camps and various professional organizations. Laborers comprise 85 percent of the 1.5 million Indian expatriates in the Kingdom.
Asked to spell out the issues that the committee was looking at, Dr. Singhvi cited recruitment practices as one of them. "They need a proper assessment and analysis. At present, recruitment is done by private agencies. We have to ensure that justice should be done to the people in the matter of recruitment."
Dr. Singhvi also referred to the prevailing sentiment among the NRIs against granting voting rights to the Indians abroad. This would lead to the induction of politics in the expatriate Indian community and create an environment incompatible with the local customs and traditions. Moreover, the sheer size of the community would create logistic and other problems.
Dr. Singhvi said that during meetings with the NRIs, the committee received representations on the educational problems, especially the $50,000 fee charged by some institutions for the admission of NRI children to professional courses in India.
Among other problems highlighted at a meeting at the Indian Embassy were the high cost of transportation (over Rs100,000) charged by Air-India for carrying the bodies of Indian workers who die during their stay in the Gulf; incentives for remittances routed through official channels; mandatory domicile rule in some states resulting in NRIs' children being separated from their parents at an early stage.
