A junior Indian foreign minister arrived in Saudi Arabia on Wednesday on a mission to bring home 10,000 laid off Indian workers stranded in the kingdom without enough money for food or plane tickets.
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External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj today said Saudi Arabia has agreed to grant exit visas to Indian workers, who are struck the country after losing their jobs, and will also provide free passage to them for their return to India.
The return of stranded Indian workers in Saudi Arabia may be delayed as rules now do not allow them to be flown back to India on the flights used to fly in Haj pilgrims.
An Asian labourer works at the construction site of a building in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia August 2, 2016. “The matter has been satisfactorily resolved”, she said and thanked the Saudi King and his government for it.
The state-linked al-Watan newspaper on Wednesday quoted Zayed al-Sobaie, director-general of the Labor Ministry in Jiddah, as saying the Labor Ministry, the Interior Ministry and other government bodies are working to resolve the issue of unpaid wages by Saudi Oger.
Sheikh also said that the validity of passports of some of the Indian workers has expired and the Indian consulate was renewing those documents.
Other foreign governments, including France, the Philippines and Bangladesh, have been pressing Saudi authorities and company executives to ensure that construction firms pay their workers. The committee meeting at the Parliament House noted that overseas Pakistanis were facing severe financial problems because the companies, which hired them, were not paying them salaries for the last several months. They caused traffic disruptions and shut down a gas station, the report said.
Saudi Arabia has been revealed as the largest importer of gold from the UAE for 2015, with a value of US1.8 million, according to a recently-released Dubai Chamber of Commerce and Industry special report.
He said 6,225 workers belonging to Saudi Oger are in nine camps in Riyadh, six in Jeddah and one in Dammam.
Meanwhile, the official Saudi Press Agency reported that the Saudi government has issued orders to let Indian workers find other employers and to allow them to get new visas.
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The news follows the decision by the government to stop the company from receiving projects after it received multiple complaints about the non-payment of wages, the newspaper said.
