The Indian Embassy in Riyadh finally repatriated ten of the 11 aggrieved Indian female workers back home.
The workers were given final exit by the contracting company, which had hired them to work as cleaners in a Riyadh hospital.
According to informed sources, the remaining worker will be repatriated next week. Her travel documents could not be processed along with her compatriots because the company had lost her passport and the Indian Embassy had to issue a new passport for her.
On Tuesday night, the workers were transported in a minibus arranged by the Indian Embassy to King Khaled International Airport. Indian social workers also bid farewell to the workers and offered them gift bags.
The Indian Embassy arranged the flight tickets for the workers from the Indian Community Welfare Fund (ICWF) and mediated with the contracting company to safeguard their final exits.
A month ago Arab News had published the workers' story in which they had appealed to their embassy for help, claiming that they had not been paid their salaries for nine months.
Maniyamma Rajan Vilasini, one of the workers, told Arab News by phone that they stopped working to protest the nonpayment of their salaries. She also claimed that the company had discriminated against them, as cleaners from other nationalities including those from Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Indonesia, had been paid their salaries.
The 11 workers who hail from various cities in the southern province of Kerala are Fatima Beevi, Sumangala, Selva Natarajan, Sunitha Saleem, Suhra Ashraf, Suma Lekshmi, Beevi Basheer, Vijayalekshmi K.S., and K. Kauma.
Distressed Indian workers return home
