Most Indians in Gulf states are staying put as war continues. Can a new bill protect their rights?

The war in West Asia has cast a spotlight on India’s interests in the region. While the disruption of energy supply and maritime trade have taken precedence, the fate of 10 million Indians who work in Gulf countries has found little mention in public discourse.

The reason for this is not hard to ascertain. The overwhelming majority of Indians in the Gulf are low-income, blue collar workers.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi told Parliament on March 24 that 3.75 lakh Indians have returned from the region since the war began. The majority of them are white-collar professionals.

Experts warn that a continuation of the conflict could result in an economic slowdown in the region, resulting in fewer jobs and lower wages. Hence, blue-collar workers have decided to stay put, taking their chances with drones and ballistic missiles flying overhead. The Ministry of External Affairs said at least seven Indians have died in the Gulf states since the war began.

The immediate tasks for New Delhi are to increase diplomatic efforts towards ending hostilities in the region and working with its counterparts in the region to ensure Indians are safe. However, this episode highlights the policy neglect of Indian workers overseas.

A new bill

The main instrument governing labour migration overseas is the Indian Emigration Act 1983. In October, when the Ministry of External Affairs published the Overseas Mobility (Facilitation and Welfare) Bill, 2025, scholars and experts of migration hoped that the exploitation of Indian workers in foreign countries would finally be addressed.

Comments were invited on the draft in November.

Much has changed since 1983, when the Emigration Act was enacted, to liberalise colonial-era restrictions. The number of clearances and recruitment licences granted to agents increased under the Emigration Act, but the law failed to adequately protect the rights of migrant workers.

Since then, migration to West Asia alone has increased 12-fold, from eight lakh to one crore by 2025. Most of the 10 million Indians in the Gulf states are blue-collar workers employed in sectors such as construction, retail, hospitality, domestic and care work.

The money they send home contributes massively to the $135 billion in remittances India received in 2024 – the highest from any overseas workforce in the world.

Migration scholars and experts have established that these workers suffer gross rights violations: from work-related issues such as wage theft and extortionate recruitment fees to inhumane treatment resulting in avoidable death.

The new law is an opportunity to ensure the rights and dignity of millions of hardworking Indians who contribute to the country’s collective prosperity are protected.

Opaque management

Under the proposed law, the entire edifice of emigration governance will rest on a new, opaque bureaucratic body: the Overseas Mobility and Welfare Council, with a vast mandate. This council, comprising bureaucrats from several ministries, will be assisted by the Director General of Overseas Mobility with regional officers.

The Director General of Overseas Mobility is similar to the Protector General of Emigrants, the authority currently tasked with protecting the interests of Indian workers going abroad. With 16 offices across India, it can grant and revoke the licenses of recruitment agents.

The new council’s work will be expansive, from tackling irregular emigration, leveraging bilateral mobility agreements to studying overseas labour markets. The bill also vests the council with the powers to create and administer schemes for the welfare of emigrants and advise the government on all matters of emigration.

But the bill’s wording is ambiguous, stating that the council shall exercise powers and perform “all or any” of these duties. Essentially the bill will install a new centralised body atop the existing administrative structure. Such a design fails the test of accountability as well as efficiency in governance.

Rights-based approach

The Indian government’s attempt to overhaul the Emigration Act has been prompted by the growing labour shortages in developed and wealthy countries, due to ageing populations, skill shortages and the reluctance of native-born workers to take up precarious jobs.

The Indian government hopes that workers migrating to other countries will alleviate the unemployment crisis in India. The Ministry of External Affairs has signed labour mobility agreements with 20 countries since 2018.

While it is wise to pay attention to facilitating the mobility of workers, the crucial question is mobility on what terms? When a sovereign state approaches this question, its foremost concern must be to protect the rights of its citizens. Given that the Indian government has also acknowledged that workers are being exploited, any new law must place a rights-based approach at its heart.

The first step, then, is for the bill to commit to protecting the rights, dignity and agency of emigrant Indians. This means incorporating provisions through which workers become participants to the act – for instance, by designing insurance policies based on their experiences – not passive subjects on whom the law is enacted.

The guarantee of workers’ rights should result in “safe, legal, orderly and regular” mobility. Here, New Delhi should rely on the decades of experience of workers, administrators and activists troubleshooting the problems of millions of Indian workers overseas.

If the government is serious about the rights of Indian workers overseas, the bill must consider three priorities:

1. Regulating recruitment

When Indian workers find themselves in distress overseas, the problem is seen as occurring “over there”. But the process which delivers workers to such a situation begins in India. Licensed recruitment agents, concentrated in major cities, rely on a vast network of unregistered subagents for workers willing to take up difficult jobs in foreign countries.

Data for 2024 from the Ministry of External Affairs shows that 44% of recruitment agents were concentrated in Delhi and Mumbai. Only 5% of recruitment agents were based in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, even though these states accounted for 55% of all Emigration Clearances issued in 2024, based on my calculations from the ministry’s emigration clearance reports. Since low-income workers largely hold Emigration Check Required passports, when travelling abroad on employment visas they are required to seek clearance from the Protectors of Emigrants.

Adding to this geographical disparity is that licensed recruiters do not reach workers directly. There is a chain of intermediaries, with each link adding a charge that gets passed down to the individual worker. The government has capped recruitment service charges at Rs 30,000, but it is well-known that workers routinely spend up to five times that amount to get jobs overseas. This means that workers take on debt, almost always from non-institutional sources, before seeing a job offer.

Recruiters are often the only source of information about overseas jobs, handing them an advantage in a market with an excess supply of workers. Unscrupulous recruiters misinform workers about the terms of employment and even send workers overseas on tourist visas.

The result is contract substitution: where workers find out, after landing in a foreign country, that the job they were promised does not exist, and since they are already in debt, they are forced to take up employment on whatever terms they are offered.

Unregulated recruitment also results in a loss of state revenue running into billions of rupees annually. Such practices create a black economy robbing the state of crucial revenue while risking the lives of workers.

India must insist on the globally recognised “employer pays principle”, where all costs of recruitment are borne by the employer. Workers should have legal recourse if they are charged excessive fees.

Genuine subagents must be brought within the regulatory ambit while public sector overseas recruitment companies need to be encouraged to set industry standards. At present, the six state recruiters, which include the Telangana Overseas Manpower Company and the Overseas Manpower Corporation Ltd of Tamil Nadu, account for a miniscule share of the recruitment market.

A mutually reinforcing combination of these measures will result in an efficient and fair recruitment industry.

2. Involve states

The Overseas Mobility Bill repeats the mistake of excluding state governments from the governance architecture. Instead, the proposed Overseas Mobility and Welfare Council must include representatives from states with high emigration. State governments such as Telangana and more recently Jharkhand have been working on their own policies to protect migrating workers.

Recruitment irregularities, pre-departure support and rehabilitation or reintegration for returning workers is handled by states. Attention to state level-differences in the composition of the emigrating workforce and corridors of migration is necessary for nimble policy design, which helps with context specific responses. These are crucial elements to consider when designing policies that affect millions.

While in the past workers from the South dominated migration, today every second Indian going to West Asia is from Uttar Pradesh or Bihar. Kerala accounts for less than 5% of emigrating workers, based on my calculations using the state-wise Emigration Clearance Reports published by the Ministry of External Affairs.

The proposed law should aim to facilitate knowledge transfers between states, ensure policy coherence and facilitate cooperation across administrative scales in implementation.

There is valuable experience in states such as Kerala, which created the Department of Non-Resident Keralites’ Affairs back in 1996. That should be leveraged by northern states such as Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.

3. Engage civil society

It is a common refrain among migrants to West Asia that Indian embassies and consular officials are unreachable and unsympathetic. There are obvious limitations to state capacities in foreign jurisdictions.

The state’s embassies and consulates act as nodes in foreign countries. But if these nodes were connected to the networks of civil society actors and had established protocols for dealing with them, they could fulfil their policy mandate.

Trade unions could also be important partners. India’s Central Trade Unions have representation at global labour forums and federations, such as the International Labour Organisation and International Trade Unions Confederation. International labour migration is a core focus for these bodies where Indian voices need to be strengthened.

India should follow The Philippines and recognise civil society actors as partners of the state rather than excluding a vast resource that could help realise policy goals.

Economic downturns in segmented labour markets, like the Gulf states, can result in a race to the bottom as migrants compete for fewer available jobs. If hostilities persist, India must work with other labour -sending countries to protect the common interest of all workers rather than pitting them against each other.

The Bharatiya Janata Party-led government projects itself as a vishwaguru, or world leader. But the true test of India’s global heft is its ability to protect Indian workers overseas. The bill, in its current form, is a long way from making that happen.

Usman Jawed is an independent migration researcher focusing on the Indo-Gulf migration corridor.