No hike in wages of Indian workers, says envoy to UAE

Abu Dhabi, Nov 18: The Indian Ambassador to the UAE, T.P. Seetharam, has denied a report suggesting India has recently revised the minimum wage requirements for its workers here.

A Reuters report published earlier on Monday said: “Over the past seven months Indian diplomats in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, have sharply increased the minimum salaries that they recommend for Indian workers at private and public firms in those states.”

It also quoted the managing director of a recruitment agency in the UAE as saying that the minimum wage for Indian blue-collar workers rose to Dh1,500 ($409) in recent weeks from Dh1,200 last year.

Reacting to the report, Seetharam told Khaleej Times no such revision in the minimum wages of Indian workers in the UAE was made in the recent past.

“We had last revised minimum wages for various categories of Indian workers employed in the UAE on March 15, 2011,” he said.

“What is happening obviously is that they might be enforcing these things now. The recruiting agencies have woken up to the fact that there is a minimum wage. So far, they might have been recruiting people without paying them the prescribed minimum wage,” said the envoy.

He said the comments from the MD of the agency quoted were false. “His allegation that it has gone up in the recent weeks shows that he doesn't know the facts. We have not made any changes in recent weeks as suggested in the story, which basically has a lot of inaccuracies.”

“There is no change to the information provided on the above-mentioned portal as of date. These wages are applicable to Indian workers in all the emirates of the UAE,” it stated.

As reported first by Khaleej Times in January 2011, India had proposed the revision of the minimum wages, mainly of the unskilled and semi-skilled workers, almost three decades after the wages ranging from Dh600 to Dh750 were set as mandatory requirements for securing Indian missions' attestation for recruitment of workers requiring immigration clearance.

“Of course, workers should be paid decent salary across the world,” said Seetharam.

However, he did not comment on the delay in implementing the Indo-UAE project on web-based attestation of recruitment contracts from the side of the UAE.

The online attestation project linking the database of the UAE Ministry of Labour, the Indian missions here and the Indian immigration authorities was meant to reduce the chances of substitution or deviation from the employment contracts agreed upon by employers when they seek the mandatory attestation from the Indian missions prior to the recruitment of workers.