BENGALURU, 8 JUNE

More than 1,500 Kannadigas working in Kuwait have returned to Karnataka during an amnesty scheme which began on 17 March, 2024, and ends on 17 June, 2024.

The Gulf nation had announced the amnesty to weed out residency violations by allowing expatriates from all nationalities to either leave Kuwait without paying fines or regularise their status by fulfilling the necessary legal requirements.

Around 35,000 expatriates from various nationalities, including more than 10,000 Indians, have benefited from the amnesty campaign, according to diplomatic sources at the Indian Embassy in Kuwait. The majority of the 1,500 Kannadigas who returned are from Dakshina Kannada district and were largely employed in the hotel and hospitality industry.

The majority of the Indians returned had run away from their original sponsors or employers due to unpaid salaries or were found working in the Gulf Nation illegally. “Those Indians who did not have a valid Indian passport or those whose visas had expired and were living illegally in Kuwait have been given an out pass (a one-way travel document to travel back to India),’’ an Indian diplomat at the Indian Embassy in Kuwait told Salar News.

Around 9.8 lakh Indians live in Kuwait and they are the largest expat community in the Gulf Nation, according to the Indian Embassy data released on 27 March, 2023. Around 3.6 lakh of them work in the domestic sector as workers (housemaids, houseboys, drivers, cooks and gardeners) who are not allowed to bring in their dependents. The private sector workers constitute around 4.7 lakh (construction workers, technicians, company drivers, engineers, doctors, nurses, chartered accountants and IT experts). Another category is that of dependents of people on work visas (1.08 lakh), out of which, about 40,000 Indian students are studying in 26 Indian schools in the country. The government sector has around 25,000 Indian nationals (mainly engineers, doctors, paramedics and nurses), according to the government data. 

In its poll promises, Congress government in the State had assured of the establishment of a dedicated ministry for Non-Resident Indians. This initiative, modelled after Kerala's NRI ministry, aims to address the issues faced by Kannadiga NRIs worldwide. -Salar News