The US State Department’s sixth annual Trafficking in Persons report again put India on its Tier Two Special Watch List for the third straight year. India was cited for its alleged failure to show evidence of increasing efforts to eliminate human trafficking. According to the report, India is a source, destination and transit country for trafficking for the purpose of forced or bonded labor and prostitution. Among its recommendations are for India to take the necessary measures to rescue bonded laborers, create a national law enforcement agency to handle all forms of trafficking, and provide long-term protection for trafficked victims. Meanwhile, the Indian External Affairs Ministry criticized the report, saying that India rejects the “judgmental and prescriptive approach by a foreign government."
The Ministry of Women and Child Welfare has instructed state police and local governments to register all cases of missing girls in their area in an attempt to address the acute underreporting of trafficking cases in the country. India has a thriving flesh industry along Delhi’s G B Road, in Kolkata’s Sonagachi and in Mumbai’s Kamathipura. However, according to data from the National Crime Records Bureau only 46 women in 2003 and 89 in 2004 had been trafficked. According to a ministry official the trafficking of girls is increasing at an alarming rate, with clients allegedly preferring those as young as 10 to 12 years. However, national figures do not reflect this trend.
The Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs announced new regulations on 4 June that would impose a jail term of up to five years and a fine of Rs25,000 on illegal recruiters for the Gulf area. The new regulations was an offshoot of recent incidents of violence involving Indian laborers in Dubai and the increasing number of workers complaining to the Indian missions in the Gulf about non-payment of salaries. The government wants to hold recruiting agents directly responsible for the problems encountered by the laborers they deploy to the Gulf area. In addition, Overseas Indian Affairs Minister Vayalar Ravi said that the government is also planning to post a vigilance officer from the Central Vigilance Commission in each of the eight offices of the Protector of Emigrants (PoE) to address reports of widespread corruption and the recent exposure of a high-level immigration racket in these offices. These measures are among the steps the government is taking to reform the overseas recruitment industry.
Indian authorities arrested 47 Middle East-bound youths at the Indira Gandhi International Airport on 11 June after immigration officials found irregularities in their travel documents. The would-be migrants from Andhra Pradesh and Punjab had genuine passports containing forged ECNR (Emigration Check Not Required) stamps, forged signature of the visa issuing officer and fake stamps of the Regional Passport Office. Investigators are searching for the agents responsible for the forged visa racket.
The Indian government has decided to enter into Memoranda of Understanding (MoU) with various countries in the Gulf region and with Malaysia, which are hosting a large number of Indian migrant workers. The move is aimed at ensuring the welfare of expatriate workers in the wake of increasing incidents of harassment and exploitation of Indian laborers in these countries. According to Minister for, New Delhi is planning to negotiate MoUs on labor and employment with Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait, Oman, Bahrain and Qatar in the Gulf and with Malaysia.
The Indian Embassy in Riyadh announced that the United Nations Compensation Commission (UNCC) has approved the payment of compensation to Indian victims of the 1990-91 Gulf War. The names and passport numbers of the untraced claimants have been posted by the Indian Ministry of External Affairs at its website. The UNCC set September this year as the deadline for tracing and paying the claimants.
Following a high-level meeting in Delhi on 6 June, the government decided that, starting early next year, the Home Ministry would be issuing multi-purpose identity cards to all residents living in five states that are within a 10 km radius of its border with Bangladesh. The issuance of the cards has dual purposes. The first is to stop the continuous inflow of irregular migrants from Bangladesh and the other is to recognize all current residents in these border areas as legitimate Indian citizens.
Thousands of migrant Kashmiri Hindus, known as “Pandits," gathered at a holy shrine in the disputed region on 4 June to pray for their early return to their ancestral homes in the strife-torn state. More than 250,000 Pandits were forced out of their homes during an insurgency against Indian rule in Jammu and Kashmir in 1989. Although a number of Kashmiri Hindus have settled in other parts of the country, some have opted to live under poor living conditions in Jammu. The possibility of their return seems dim, however, as separatist militants have declared that they would not allow the return of the minority Hindus to their homes.
Minister for Overseas Indian Affairs Vayalar Ravi signed an agreement with a newly inaugurated research unit at the Center for Development Studies (CDS) for the conduct of studies on migration and the Indian diaspora. The research unit, which was inaugurated by Ravi, would be conducting studies on the operation of recruitment agencies and is also expected to prepare a manual to be used in the pre-departure orientation of Indians going abroad for employment. Other future research plans of the unit include a study on the health impact of migration and a study on replacement migration.
According to the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, a record number of Indians became permanent residents of the United States last year. Some 84,681 Indians got their green cards last year, coming in second only to Mexicans who were issued 161,445 green cards. The high number of Indians issued green cards over the past two years was largely due to the migration of many software professionals in the 1990s on employment visas.
According to a study by JP Morgan, India is the largest recipient of remittances from overseas workers, estimated at about $21 billion. This is partly due to the increasing number of highly educated Indians who had migrated to the US, UK and Canada to seek employment over the last decade. In the US alone, six of the 100 highest paid executives in Silicon Valley are Indians. They include Rajiv Dutta of eBay, Vyomesh Joshi, HP’s EVP, Abhijit Talwarkar, LSI Logic CEO, Kamal Agarwal of National Semiconductors.
Massive floods and landslides triggered by heavy monsoon rains that began on 31 May have submerged nearly 3,000 villages and displaced an estimated 160,000 people in northeastern India. Among the worst affected areas were Assam and Tripura. Assam’s Revenue, Relief and Rehabilitation Minister Bhumidhar Barman said that four people drowned in separate incidents on 13 June, bringing the death toll to seven. The government has set up some 1,500 makeshift shelters for the flood victims.
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