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Interestingly Covid 19 Pandemic has proven that the migrant labourers have been working all these years without adequate medical protection and genuine medical insurance.
In the initial days of the lockdown, the request to the Kerala government was to send regular medicines for lifestyle diseases. Since medicines are expensive in the GCC, migrants often procure their medication from India and stock it for few months. Moreover the suspension of flights caused an acute shortage of these medicines, and exposed the frail medical insurances.
The Government of Kerala should exert pressure on the central government to ensure proper implementation of various MOUs being signed on the protection of migrant labour, particularly those with respect to their health and working conditions.
Additionally, GCC workspace is also riddled with problems that are particularly related to the discrimination of women migrant workers, a vast majority of whom are hailing from Kerala. Most of the migrant workforce which dominates the workspace of the GCC region — accounting for about three-quarters of the workforce of the region (ILO, 2017) — hails from
the South Asian and South-east Asian countries, and are on temporary contracts and mostly engaged in low-wage occupations. Women migrants, who are in the skilled category are mainly nurses in the organised health industry; those in the semi-skilled or unskilled category
are domestic workers, care workers, cleaning crew, manufacturing workers, salon staff and salespersons. These workers are vulnerable to abuse and exploitation.
For instance, domestic workers, who are mostly women, are greatly vulnerable to abuse owing to the very nature of their workspace. However our attention on women migrant workforce is largely limited to GCC countries and to some extent to OECD countries. Interestingly, Malayali nurses and
care givers have been working in the most volatile countries of the world such as Iraq, Syria, Libya , Yemen, Israel, including the remotest Asia-Pacific country, Papua New Guinea . These women ventured out to these countries through recruiting agencies due to the vulnerable domestic situation. The government of Kerala should undertake an in-depth assessment of the migrant women and should focus on the gaps in the creation of women centric, rights-based policies to safeguard migrants.