According to hospital sources, the government hospital in Semesi has 35 bodies of Indian nationals, of which 10 are not still identified, while the El-Emaan Hospital here has four bodies of Indian expatriates and one is still not identified. A source from the hospital said the bodies are lying in these two hospitals ranging a period from one month to 12 months.
Two social workers, Mohideen Kutty and Shihab Kotugal, are coordinating with hospital authorities to help them identify the unclaimed bodies.
“It’s a long task to identify dead people when the hospital authorities have only the name and nationality,” said Kutty, a social worker from Kerala.
He added that the people in the community should report any missing person to the police and the police with the help of the hospital authorities could come to some conclusion in identifying bodies.
A senior official from the Indian Embassy in Riyadh told Arab News that hospital authorities should report the death to the mission with a copy of the passport or the resident certificate of the dead person. “Such information will help the mission track down the families of the dead person either at home or in the Kingdom,” the official said.
He said that some 100 people from the Indian expatriate community die each month in the Kingdom due to accidents or natural causes. There are some 1.8 million Indian expatriates living in the Kingdom.
The mission has the Indian Community Welfare Fund (ICWF), which is aimed at providing boarding and lodging for distressed overseas Indian workers in domestic sector and unskilled laborers, extending emergency medical care to those in need, providing air passage to stranded overseas Indians in need, providing initial legal assistance to the overseas Indians in deserving cases and expenditure on airlifting the mortal remains to India or local cremation/burial of deceased overseas Indians in such cases where a sponsor is unable or unwilling to do so as per the contract and the family is unable to meet the cost.
“Overseas Indian workers duped by unscrupulous intermediaries in the host countries, runaway housemaids, accident victims, deserted spouses of overseas Indians or undocumented overseas Indian workers in need of emergency assistance or any other overseas Indian citizens who are in distress would be the main beneficiaries of the fund.”
The official said that the mission ensures that no Indian expatriate who is in need of humanitarian assistance from the mission is left out.
“We facilitate, repatriation of dead bodies to India, ferry home stretcher-patients and even supplement the compensation paid by the sponsors in case of accidents, deaths and loss of limbs,” he stressed, adding that the Riyadh ICWF is funded by the Indian Diaspora and Indian philanthropists who voluntarily contribute toward helping their members.
Under the program, the ICWF in Riyadh helps the repatriation of around 600 mortal remains of Indian workers in the Kingdom annually and a large number of workers benefit from compensation scheme which offers supplementary funds to those employees who are paid less than their due compensation by their sponsors.
