New Delhi: In yet another case of human trafficking from India to West Asia, a 40-year-old man from a poor farmer family in West Bengal was taken to Saudi Arabia by an illegal recruiting agent on the pretext of being provided with a job and is now being kept in a locked room in Riyadh, along with other victims like him.
Safidul Sekh, son of Nafuruddin Sekh, a resident of Gandhina in Nadia district in West Bengal, was taken to Saudi Arabia with the promise of being provided with a job with a good salary by an illegal recruiting agent in March 2022. The agent took Rs 2 lakhs from the family for the job. On landing in Saudi Arabia, Safidul found that there was no job waiting for him and he and other victims like him were kept in a locked room for about three to four months. Later, the contractor forced Safidul and the others to work at meagre wages. However, that work also lasted for a couple of months or so. The victims are now again being kept in a locked room at a market in Riyadh where they are close to starvation.
The helpless family then went to the police station and lodged a complaint against the illegal recruiting agent, Naju Mandal. The police, however, refused to register an FIR, and instead asked the family to approach the court. Finally, on Monday, Safidul’s father Nafuruddin submitted a memorandum to the chairman of the West Bengal Migrant Labour Welfare Board in which he narrated his son’s and family’s ordeal for the last one-and-a-half years. In the memorandum, Nafuruddin sought the government’s help to bring his son back home from Riyadh.
“Due to the lack of any job in our area for several months, we faced many problems in our daily life,” Nafuruddin stated in the memorandum. “Even we could not meet two square meals a day. We were helpless to support our family. In this scenario, Naju Mandal, son of Chand Ali Mandal, a labour-broker from my neighbouring area (Nandalpur) came to my house several times.”
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According to Nafuruddin, Naju Mandal assured the family that he could send Safidul to Riyadh and “arrange a permanent job with the highest wages”. But for that, a total of Rs 2 lakhs will be required, along with necessary documents. “According to that promise, l and my son (Safidul Sekh, 40) sold a part of our immovable property and also borrowed money from others at higher interest and handed over Rs 2 lakhs to the broker Naju Mandal,” Nafuruddin stated in the memorandum.
“That broker prepared the necessary documents, including passport and visa, in the name of my son and sent him to Riyadh in March 2022 via Mumbai under a two-year contract. After reaching Riyadh my son remained without any work for about three to four months. The contractor concerned kept my son and others in a closed room and took away all the papers from them.”
A source close to Nafuruddin’s family told ETV Bharat that Naju Mandal had been a neighbour of the victim for a long time now. He has now disappeared without a trace. In his memorandum, Nafuruddin stated that the victims were later “forced to work with very low wages and that work did not last more than two to three months”.
“Since then everyone, including my son, has been locked up in a room in Riyadh's Batha Market,” the distraught father stated. “There they are passing their days in unbearable conditions. Even most days they are in starvation or half-starvation (sic). Here, we are spending the nights in great anxiety.”
In the memorandum, Nafuruddin demanded that his son be brought back from Riyadh at the full expense of the government. Safidul’s is not the sole such case. Every year, hundreds of poor people from India are trafficked to countries in West Asia and Southeast Asia and made to do forced labour or subjected to other forms of exploitation.
When asked about the number of people in West Bengal, who fall victim to human trafficking every year, SK Jinnar Ali, Chairperson of the National Board of Council, National Anti-Trafficking Committee, told ETV Bharat that it is difficult to provide the exact figures as this is part of an illegal activity. However, the figure he provided about the number of victims rescued was no less staggering. “A lot of people have been rescued from Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Malaysia, Tanzania and Dubai,” Ali said. “From 2018 till now, around 20,000 people from West Bengal have been rescued by our department.”
According to the US State Department’s “2023 Trafficking in Persons Report: Saudi Arabia”, of the 1,454 potential victims identified by the Saudi government, 942 were for forced labourers, 130 for sex trafficking, and 382 for forced begging and “slavery-like practices”. The victims were nationals of Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Morocco, Pakistan, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Uganda, and Yemen.
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