DUBAI — A new program introduced by India’s Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs aims to encourage the country’s migrant workers in the Gulf to put aside savings for their inevitable return instead of sending all their earnings home to their families.
Five million Indians live and work in the Gulf on temporary employment or contract visas, mostly on construction sites, in hospitals and as household servants. Remittances by migrant workers to India totaled $64 billion in 2011, according to the World Bank, making India the leading receiver of remittances in the world, and Indians in the Gulf accounted for about 30 percent of that. But most of the money that they periodically send back is spent by their parents, wives and children; little gets saved.
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