No Crawl In Kerala

he emirate’s recent headline-grabbing troubles have again put the spotlight on the close links between India and Dubai. Dubai World’s problems may have shaken the financial world, but there seems to be no panic—not even among the sizeable Indian community in the UAE (whose largest trading partner is India). The official position seeks to calm the waters. “No Indian bank or financial entity is grossly overexposed in Dubai. Where the Indian government or private sector is concerned, no emirate-associated project in India is likely to be affected as...the central and state governments are committed to infrastructure projects,” says Talmiz Ahmed, India’s ambassador to the UAE.

With crude oil prices having stabilised over $75 per barrel, the Gulf economies are on a better footing. A fact buttressed by a recent Centre for Development Studies (CDS) report that while around 1,73,000 emigrants from Kerala returned home between October 2008 and June 2009, about 97,000 went back to fresh jobs in the Gulf. In addition, 1,42,000 new emigrants have since taken up jobs in West Asia. “During the last crisis, we were expecting Kerala to be very badly affected but both migrations and remittances have not been affected much. Kerala migrants are able to adjust,” says Prof Irudayarajan of CDS. Clearly, Dubai’s denizens have gotten used to business as unusual.