Engineering degree—check. Passport—check. Overseas job—check. This New Year's Eve, Amrit Das from Tripura and Dinesh Midde and Sanjit Roy from West Bengal were all set for a fresh start. Assured of well-paid jobs in a major "oil and gas company" in Malaysia, they looked forward to the perks, including free accommodation, medical expenses and generous overtime.
Six months later, the three workers have become symbols of the exploitation Indian workers are subjected to in Malaysia. Far from the public eye in India, a large number of Indian workers in Malaysia have virtually become refugees, taking shelter at a hostel of sorts run by the Indian High Commission. The case of these three workers is particularly poignant, for they are unable to return to India unless they pay a hefty fine to their employer, a penalty they cannot afford and which experts say is illegal.
The issue is serious, for Indian authorities in Malaysia say they have already repatriated 8,000 workers over 2014-15, while a steady stream of penury-struck workers continues to knock at their doors.
Of course, during the six-hour flight to Kuala Lumpur, 28-year-old Amrit never imagined it would come to this. He thought only about how he would send money home to his ailing fisherman father, an older brother whose health failed from overwork and a younger brother in school. The MYR 3,000 (Rs 50,000) salary an employment agency in India had said he would get in Malaysia was more than he'd ever dreamed of.
The dream turned into a nightmare the moment he landed at Kuala Lumpur, at 6.30 AM on February 10. The Indian employment agent, Kabir Hossain Mandal, received Amrit and 20-odd other Indian workers on the same flight, at the airport. He commandeered all their passports. In India, Mondal and his partner Firoj had claimed to own an employment agency, "Rohan International". Amrit had paid them Rs 1,00,000, taking out a loan, for an engineer's job in Malaysia. "We were told our passport is being taken for signing our employment contracts, after which we would get it back," Amrit says. That was the last time he saw his passport. Nor did a contract with the company materialise.
Everything the agents had told Amrit in India quickly unravelled into lies. The Malaysian company, Syarikat Pembinaan & Kejuruteraan Naga turned out to be a construction labour contractor, not a petroleum giant. He was not brought there as a well-paid engineer but as a "General Worker", a category of unskilled labourer under Malaysian law, which includes low paid manual workers. It was work Amrit was neither trained for nor willing to do.