THIRUVANANTHAPURAM, 9 June 2007 — Women migrant workers from Kerala, though less in numbers, are more educated than their men counterparts, according to the data released recently by the Kerala Planning Board (KPB). The report comes as the Indian government estimates that more Keralite women are becoming migrant workers compared to men.
Keralite women’s emigration nearly doubled between 1999 and 2004, the report said. Women made up 20.6 percent of all Non-Resident Indians, or NRIs, in 2004 while in 1999 the percentage of women to men working abroad was 10.6 percent.
The report estimated that 45 percent of the Keralite women are graduates compared to 15 percent non-resident Keralite men. About 80 percent of these women have a secondary or higher level education, while corresponding percentage among men emigrants was only 45 percent, says the KPB’s Economic Review for 2006-2007.
“On the whole, conditions in Kerala and across the world favor increasing women emigration,” the review says. “The demand for educated and skilled job seekers is growing. The future appears to be for women who can work as nurses, saleswomen, take up office jobs, work as caregivers or can handle legal, art and design, computer or business operations.”
The report recommends stringent measures to protect NRK women from abuses and sexual exploitation under the pretext of recruiting for “entertainment” programs.
“While it is true that certain types of job opportunities do exist for educated and skilled women emigrants, there is need to recognize the vulnerability of lone woman migrant and to provide security and safety to such women,” the report said. “Efforts should be made to maintain records of all emigrants and ensure their well-being and eliminate any type of atrocities against them,” it says.
Besides the Gulf countries, the other major destinations for Kerala emigrants are the USA, England, Singapore, and Maldives Islands. Within the Gulf region, the Kingdom and the United Arab Emirates account for more than two thirds of all emigrants in the Gulf.
In 2004, there were 1.529 million men emigrants and 309,000 women emigrants. Women constituted 16.8 percent of the total. In 1999, the numbers were 1.235 million men and 127,000 women, which was only 9.3 percent of the total.
The review based its estimates on two studies by the state’s think-tank, the Center for Development Studies, titled the Kerala Migration Survey (1999) and the South Asian Migration Study (2004).
The largest number of Keralite women workers comes from the Kottayam, Ernakulam and Pathanamthitta districts. Thirty-two percent of these women are Christians while eight percent are Muslims, the report said.
Nearly three-fourths of these women are married. The number of unmarried Keralite women going overseas to work grew considerably between 1999 and 2004; seven percent of Keralite women NRIs were unmarried in 1999.
“This very large increase in the number of unmarried women leaving Kerala to foreign countries is a relatively new phenomenon and the trend suggests a further acceleration in the emigration of young unmarried women from Kerala in the coming years,” the review says.
It also suggests “some sort of a safety net or protection for women (and men) emigrants, given the unpleasant problems they often face at the point of destination. Perhaps they could be included under a welfare fund and their interface with the local Indian diplomatic authorities could be strengthened.
“One important feature of the Kerala economy, which makes it different from the rest of the country, is net out-migration of labor force particularly to Gulf and inflow of huge remittances into the economy,” it points out.
During 2003, the amount of remittances from Gulf was as high as 22 percent of the state’s Net Domestic Product. Moreover, almost 25 percent of the men labor force work in Gulf.
The migration to other countries and to industrially advanced Indian states is also substantially high. The worsening unemployment situation is attributed to the inability of the state’s economy to generate employment opportunities over a decade.
According to the CDS study, the number of emigrants went up by 35 percent in last five years from 1.36 million in 1999 to 1.84 million in 2004.
Among the emigrants from Kerala, Muslims constituted 43.7 percent. Hindus stand next with 31.2 percent and Christians with 25.1 percent. However, the rate of growth in migration was highest among the Christians at 53.9 percent while it was 17.3 percent among Muslims.
The study further shows that migration to the Gulf countries, which was 95 percent of the total migration, went down to 90 percent. The migration to the USA, European countries and Africa went up from five percent in 1999 to 10 percent in 2004. Among the Gulf countries, UAE replaced Saudi Arabia as the most preferred destination.
In 2005, 125,000 workers from Kerala went abroad in search of job, constituting 22.8 percent of the 549,000 emigrants from India. The other leading states are Tamil Nadu (21.3 percent), Karnataka (13.7 percent), Andhra Pradesh (8.8 percent), Gujarat (9.1 percent), Maharashtra (5.3 percent), Punjab (4.4 percent) and Rajasthan (3.9 percent).
More than 80 percent of the emigrants went to West Asia of which 35.4 percent went to UAE and 18.2 percent to Saudi Arabia.
The state-run Overseas Development and Employment Promotion Consultants Ltd. (ODEPC) could export manpower to countries like Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain, Kuwait, Libya, Singapore, Malaysia, Brunei, Cyprus and Sri Lanka.
It sent 99 persons from Dec. 11, 2005 to Jan. 31, 2006. Of them, 62 went to Saudi Arabia, 11 to the UAE, eight to Sri Lanka, seven each to Oman and Qatar and four to Malaysia. Out of them, 67 were nurses, nine technicians, seven doctors, four sales executives, four administrative staff, three engineers, three foremen and two binders.
