16,000 Indians lost jobs abroad

Minister for Overseas Indian Affairs Vayalar Ravi said in the Rajya Sabha on Thursday that 16,000 to 20,000 Indians had returned after losing their jobs abroad.

He said that up to 2 lakh people return each year, and the government was seeking reports from embassies to understand the trend. The Indian diaspora is 2.5-crore strong.

A study by the Centre for Development Studies (CDS), Thiruvananthapuram, is comforting. The survey of 15,000 households in Kerala, from June to December 2008, showed that the trend is almost the same as in 2007. Kerala sends India’s largest contingent of workers to the Gulf.

“Indian emigrants to the Gulf have a social network of Indians… So it is not easy to get rid of them,” said Irudaya Rajan, professor at CDS.