Trouble in Dubai - ill treatment of migrant Indian workers in Dubai and other countries in the Gulf

There's trouble brewing among construction workers in Dubai. All that glamour and eye popping grandeur is just a mask to conceal the real thing going on. This headline appeared in the Midday website about disgruntled construction workers working in Dubai's many high rise building projects beating up supervisors and vandalizing equipment. A similar story came in the March edition of the Outlook magazine.

Working on dirt cheap wages, treated inhumanely and living in appalling housing conditions, these migrant workers, mainly from Southern India and other countries of the Indian sub continent slave all day in the blazing sun on huge construction projects. What has been projected of Dubai over the past 10 years is just the icing over the cake. Not much has been documented about working conditions and the lives of migrant workers in the princely state.

The Gulf has a reputation of treating citizens from Indian, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladsesh badly. I had a first had encounter when i was growing up in Kuwait. I would go with my uncle to this place called Murghab and see countless Indians with desperation writ large on their faces trying to eke a living at the hands of their stinking rich Arab bosses and send the money back home, even still get to be with their family.

Now that the Indian economy is booming, this attitude among the Gulf Arabs has to change. Pity it has not. India has enough arsenal to reduce these countries to dust. Why is that we Indians always go abroad to lick another person's feet when we can live like kings in our own country? We give American clients the red carpet treatment whenever they come to India, trying all that we can to mask the poverty and dirt around them. When Indian employees go there for off-site visits, we are ignored. When will all of this come to an end? Only after we drop a nuke on some one?

What is the Indian government doing to minimise all this? We should throw our weight around just like the Americans do, arm twisitng the threatening them so they treat our citizens with respect and not like dirt. Uncle Sam sees red whenever the hair on an American's body is singed.

Indian migrants in the Gulf pump in an estimated 10 to 15 billion dollars (might not be the correct figure, correct me if i am wrong) and we offer nothing in return except for shocking silence and red tapism. The majority of this money comes from Mallus in the Gulf. I have met some of them when i was in Kuwait and they have come a long way since they went there during the pre-oil boom days. We should give them something back.

Folks out there, what do you think?