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| Foreign laborers outside the Saudi immigration offices. © AFP |
Over 10,000 starving
Indian workers in Saudi Arabia have received 16,000kg of food from their own
government, which was distributed in front of the India’s consulate in the port
city of Jeddah.
RT
News report continues:
Over
10,000 Indian workers were laid off in Saudi Arabia after growth has slowed in
the country, triggered by the negative effects of falling oil prices.
The
workers were left without any money to buy food or travel back to India. They
asked their government for help.
The
desperate situation came to light after India’s Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj
said “large numbers” of Indians had been laid off in Saudi Arabia.
Swaraj
appealed to the Indian community on Twitter to “help your fellow brothers and
sisters.”
“I assure you that no Indian worker rendered
unemployed in Saudi Arabia will go without food," she wrote.
Investigations
into the matter revealed that thousands were starving across Saudi Arabia and
Kuwait.
Swaraj
told the Indian consulate in Saudi Arabia to make sure that no unemployed
person starves and asked to monitor the situation on an hourly basis.
The
Indian community was in charge of distributing the food supplies in the Red Sea
port city of Jeddah.
India’s
media revealed that local company Saudi Oger had failed to pay waged to workers
for seven months. It employed a total of 50,000 employees and 4,000 of them
were Indians.
“For
the last seven months these Indian workers of Saudi Oger were not getting their
salaries and the company had also stopped providing food to these workers,”
confirmed Indian Consul General Mohammad Noor Rehman Sheikh.
India’s government is also
planning to evacuate the stranded workers.
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