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Article

2 Feb 2022

Author:
Pramod Acharya, Migrant-Rights.org

A death a day: Nepali workers in Saudi

See all tags Allegations

In a previous report, Migrant-Rights.org investigated the high rate of unexplained deaths of Nepali workers in Qatar. As mentioned in that report, the mortality rates in Saudi Arabia are far higher...

The actual number of deaths is likely higher since the FEB’s data only include those whose families have received compensation after death... According to FEB data for the fiscal year 2020-2021, the highest number of Nepali migrant worker deaths were reported in Saudi Arabia — a total of 368, or at least one death every day. More than a quarter of these deaths were classified as “natural,”...

The Embassy of Nepal in Saudi Arabia did not respond to MR’s data requests. But the documents issued by the embassy were found to have categorised cause of death as “natural,” even if a worker died for different reasons...

The Nepal government is aware of the increasing number of ‘natural’ deaths in Saudi. “But we cannot do anything since the Saudi government does the investigations. We must rely on the reports received from the Nepali embassy,” admits Rajan Prasad Shrestha, executive director of the FEB.

But he thinks that many of those “natural deaths” are related to the environment, more precisely the high temperature...More than 20,000 Nepali workers in the GCC have been forced to leave their job after being disabled, injured, or sick in 2017-2018 alone...

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