Indian authorities revealed Monday that 455 Indian workers died in 2012 and 2013 while working on construction crews in Qatar in preparation for the 2022 World Cup.
With 974 Indians dead in construction-site injuries in Qatar in the last four years, the situation has drawn attention to the nation’s alleged human rights violations.
It is an unusually high number of deaths among the 500,000 Indian construction workers in Qatar, but not high enough to concern Qatari authorities.
“Indians make up the largest community in Qatar … twice the number of Qatari nationals,” Ali bin Sumaikh Al Marri, chairman Qatar National Human Rights Committee told AFP. “If we look at the numbers of Qataris who died… of natural causes… over the past two years, we see that numbers of deaths among the Indian community are normal.”
Dilep Singh Khalsa, the younger brother of Jitender Singh Khalsa, an Indian construction worker who died at a Qatari worksite, told Channel News Asia, “Last time when he (Jitender) left for Qatar, he told me (about) the working conditions… (The company) manufactures a very toxic and highly poisonous gas, which is H2S gas, and people die in two seconds if they don’t rush to a safer zone in the camp or in the company.”
Last month, the Guardian reported that at least 382 Nepalese workers in Qatar have died over the last two years, including 185 who died in 2013. In a November 2013 warning, Amnesty International indicated that migrant workers are exposed to tropical Qatari temperatures for more than 10 hours per day and are housed in cramped, overcrowded accommodations.
Human Rights Watch issued a report in June 2012 indicating that Qatar’s restrictive work sponsorship system grants employers a high level of control over their employees. The inability to change jobs without their sponsoring employers’ permission and a complicated complaint reporting mechanism have created a system in which migrant workers in Qatar are forced to pay high recruitment fees, surrender their passports to their employers, and work in jobs and under conditions other than those for which they were hired.
Migrant workers make up 94 percent of Qatar’s workforce and are denied the right to form a union or strike. A recent proposal for a “worker’s union” would restrict all decision-making in the union to Qatari citizens.
“Workers building stadiums won’t benefit from Qatar’s general promise to end the sponsorship system: they need a deadline for this to happen before their work for the FIFA games starts,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “The government needs to ensure that the cutting edge, high-tech stadiums it’s planning to build for World Cup fans are not built on the backs of abused and exploited workers.”
Criticizing the media’s use of the fatality figures, the Indian Embassy in Qatar defended the Qatari safety record. “Considering the large size of our community, the number of deaths is quite normal — 233 in 2010, 239 in 2011, 237 in 2012, 241 in 2013 and 37 in 2014. Most of the deaths are by natural causes,” the embassy said in a statement.
“[The] Government of Qatar continues to take several measures to further improve the living and working conditions of workers, and for further strengthening administrative, legal and other mechanisms to safeguard workers’ interests … We appreciate these measures being taken by Qatari authorities,” it said.
Qatar recruits heavily from Southeastern Asian nations for its unskilled and semi-skilled work needs. These workers typically come from low to lower-middle income groups. Qatar has a population of 1.9 million, including migrant workers.