India sends food for thousands of its starving workers in Saudi Arabia

The Indian government over the weekend stepped in to assist some 10,000 Indian workers who New Delhi says are without a job, pay and food.

Over the weekend, the Indian consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, set up food-distribution centers near several labor camps where the workers live, and Indian Foreign Minister Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj dispatched two senior officials to address the issue.

“I assure you that no Indian worker rendered unemployed in Saudi Arabia will go without food,” she said on Twitter on Saturday.

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Many of the workers who say they were dismissed were employed by the conglomerate Saudi Oger Ltd. Several Indian citizens who work for the firm and were reached by The Wall Street Journal on Sunday said they haven’t received a salary in seven months and that they last received food from the company on July 20.

Many of them took to the streets Saturday in protest against Saudi Oger and said they want to get paid before they leave the country.

“We want our salaries, our passports, and our plane tickets home,” said a worker called Deepak Kumar, who has been living in the kingdom since 2009.

He was among the thousands of Indian workers who on Saturday night received food rations that included rice, onions and cooking oil distributed by the Indian consulate.

Saudi Oger didn’t respond to an emailed request for comment.

A spokesman for Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Labor and Social Development also didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Indian officials said New Delhi is working to arrange exit visas for those involved, and that Saudi authorities have assured they will register wage claims against employers.

The labor unrest is the latest example of how low oil prices have put pressure on government finances and the companies that rely on public spending for much of their business. Saudi Arabia’s biggest construction companies have felt the pinch, as have companies in other Gulf countries such as Kuwait, where Indian citizens also have been affected by the crisis.

Construction workers, many of them migrants from South Asia, are bearing the brunt of the sector’s downturn.

There are around three million Indian citizens living in Saudi Arabia, which relies on the vast population of low-paid foreign workers for cheap labor in sectors like construction. The poor working conditions for expat laborers in Saudi Arabia and in neighboring Gulf countries have drawn condemnation from rights groups in the past.

Last year, Saudi Arabia introduced a package of reforms aimed at curbing the abuses of employers, including prohibitions on confiscating the passports of foreign laborers and introducing penalties for companies that fail to pay their salaries on time.

But these violations continue, workers say.

“They are not returning our passports. The company said we need to buy our own tickets and then we’ll get our passports back,” said Adam Ali, who has been working for Saudi Oger for six years on a monthly salary of 1,215 Saudi riyals ($324). “We are unhappy and we are tired. We just don’t know what to do. There are eight to nine people living in each room. We are drinking water that we normally use for taking a bath.”

Two years of cheap crude have taken a toll on the economy of the oil-dependent kingdom. Earlier this year, Saudi Binladin Group laid off 50,000 people, most of them construction-site workers from Asian countries. The company paid the outstanding salaries before dismissing the workers.

—Gabriele Parussini in Mumbai and Nikhil Lohade in Dubai contributed to this article.

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