The number of people from Kerala who are migrating abroad has registered a surprising drop in 2016 from the numbers in 2014, breaking a long-standing pattern of people from the state moving to foreign shores for employment.
A Mint report says that 2.25 million migrations from Kerala took place last year, registering a drop of 1,54,320 from 2014, according to an early draft of a CDS report.
This is the first time that the numbers have seen a drop since 1998 when the organization started conducting these surveys.
Close to 10 percent of 30 million Keralites live abroad and total upto Rs 1 trillion in remittances each year from those working in the oil-rich countries of the Gulf.
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But why have the numbers fallen?
An Outlook report had pointed out how India’s migrant policies had resulted in most of the jobs going to people from Pakistan and Bangladesh.
There were two reasons attributed to the fall, namely ‘E-migration’ and Minimum Referral Wages.
E-Migrate:
“eMigrate online system was a sloth. It could only clear around 8000 passports per month when under the previous system, the ministry was able to clear up to 40,000 passports a month. And in just few months more than 1 lakh passports had piled up at the 10 Protector of Emigrants (POEs) offices in the country, and due to this delay, thousands of visas expired. This was a huge loss for the employers, because they spend thousands of Riyal and Dirhams to obtain the visa in their country. So, the delay in passport clearance, technical faults in the eMigrate system and expiration of visas annoyed the foreign employers”
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Minimum Referral Wages:
“Therefore, from day one, this regulation was challenged, criticized and had met bitter resistance by the recruiting agents and foreign employers in all six destination GCC countries. Ironically, two of the countries at that time had threatened to reduce their Indian workforces and hire more, lower-paid workers from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Nepal instead.”
