Nearly two months after the United Arab Emirates issued a general amnesty to allow a last chance for illegal Indian immigrants to leave the country, there is dismay at the Indian consulate general at Dubai. The reason: only 300 Indians have so far applied to avail of the scheme.
Officials at the Non-resident Keralites Affairs department, overseeing the amnesty, are baffled at the poor turnout of applicants to the scheme.
"We really now do not know how to force and convince the illegal Indian immigrants in the UAE to take up the amnesty or face punishment in a foreign country. It seems Indians working in the UAE are not aware of the seriousness of the general amnesty," a senior NORKA official said.
The UAE, a federation of seven emirates, has a population of around three million of whom 85 percent are foreigners. Indians alone in the UAE are estimated at more than 1.2 million.
The UAE has announced heavy fines and harsh jail terms for illegal residents, an estimated 300,000 people, if they do not leave the country by April 30. Most of the nearly 40,000 Indians who have been officially declared as illegal residents in the UAE are from Kerala.
NORKA officials expected that most Keralites would seek amnesty for which the Indian mission has been making special arrangements.
The NORKA official said that the Kerala government would soon send an official team to the UAE to talk to various Malayalee associations to urge the illegal immigrants to take advantage of the amnesty scheme and leave the country for good.
A ministerial sub-committee constituted by the A K Antony government has already been chalking out plans to bring back the illegal Indian residents from the various UAE cities.
As per a request from the Kerala government, Air India has already promised to give 20 percent concession for the passengers arriving on general amnesty from the UAE.
The Antony government has also set up special cells at the three international airports in Kozhikode, Kochi and Thiruvananthapuram to handle the sudden rush of expatriates. It is also planning to appoint a panel of leading lawyers with experience in international labour laws for Keralites who have to leave and have a problem in realising wage arrears.
Officials believe one reason why the UAE general amnesty has shown such a poor response from Indians may be because they want to take advantage of their illegal jobs till the amnesty period, which is April 30.
The increasing number of expatriates coming back to India has alarmed the state governments like Kerala. In the last one-decade, nearly 800,000 people from various Gulf countries returned to settle down in the cash-strapped Kerala.
But the government has not been able to do anything so far for their rehabilitation. Recent studies have warned that the exodus of expatriates from the UAE will only add to the economic and social woes of Kerala.
