Express Investigation: No compensation, say families of Indians who died in Qatar working on projects linked to FIFA World Cup

In the shadow of the Qatar World Cup will be the stories of migrant workers from India who poured into the Gulf state to turn this unlikely desert destination into a global football hub and returned home to their families in villages from Bihar to Punjab and Telangana — in coffins.

In its shadow, however, will be the stories of those migrant workers from India who poured into the Gulf state to turn this unlikely desert destination into a global football hub and returned home to their families in villages from Bihar to Punjab and Telangana — in coffins.

Over eight months, The Indian Express investigated official records, interviewed job agents, migrant welfare activists and local officials across the country, and filed Right to Information applications to track down the families of migrant workers who died in Qatar while working on projects or in jobs linked to the World Cup.

The newspaper spoke to the families of nine of them, met some at their homes, and found that they have been left in the lurch, struggling to pick up the pieces of their broken lives and battling deepening financial distress. They also had a common complaint: no compensation and a wall of denial from their employers.

In seven of those families, the workers who died were the sole breadwinners. Most of them were men of working age and have been shown as dying mainly due to “natural causes”. Three of the nine workers were under 30, including one just 22 years old, and five others under 50. In more than half of these cases, families say, there was no prior medical history, and that they came to know of the deaths through friends or colleagues of the workers in Qatar.

“We were not informed about my husband’s death by his employers. I first came to know about his death from a friend in our village who was informed by an acquaintance in Qatar,” says Savita Kumar, whose husband Akhilesh (22), a plumber from Sallahpur in Bihar’s Siwan, was trying to fit an underground pipe near a World Cup venue just outside Doha last year when the earth caved in.

https://indianexpress.com/article/express-exclusive/qatar-world-cup-kicks-off-in-a-month-spare-a-thought-for-these-men-indian-workers-dead-8219599/


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