A new milestone in bilateral understanding has been reached, with the UAE and India signing a Memorandum of Understanding on the recruitment of Indians for jobs in the UAE. The setting up of an exclusive online portal by the UAE for this purpose, which will be linked to India’s e-Migrate system, an online system controlling recruitment of employees who need prior permission from the government for their emigration, is a powerful pre-emptive strategy. This will allow the recruitment process from India to the UAE to be hermetically sealed, ensuring that no shadowy deals that exploit workers will be struck.
The new arrangement between the UAE and India is defined by many clear-cut advantages: it will ensure transparency of intent, clarity of offer and guarantee of credibility of recruiters. This are critical predicators of a new, fair and thoroughly above board process of hiring workers. These predicators will in fact redress the decades-long problem of discrepancies, contradictions and falsehoods that were the bane of workers being hired through dodgy agents and their exploitative tactics. Compounding this problem has been the lack of accountability for these shadowy hiring agencies in India, which often worked on the margins of the law only to leave behind no traces when the deceit was uncovered.
Another disturbing aspect of the hiring of Indians for jobs in the UAE has been the matter of contract substitution, a practice wherein a different, and a clearly downgraded, job contract as compared to the one which was originally shown to the recruited individuals awaited them when they arrived in the UAE. Given that the substitute contract is a bona fide document, it put the worker in an untenable position with no room for redressal for his predicament. This in effect has victimised many individuals who have ended up in jobs that are underpaid, undervalued and many a time, at odds with their skill set.
This chicanery has for long cast a deep shadow over the matter of human resource exports from India which the new system will successfully combat and vanquish. What the two governments’ efforts will enable is to provide that every worker hired from India (arriving in the UAE) is bolstered by trust and confidence to perform their job to the best of their ability, unhindered by false starts and dubious outcomes. A bona fide job offer and job contract, that has passed all tests of stringency and legalities, will guide workers to make their choices in the correct manner, laying a strong and productive foundation for their future, as well as for the society that they will be a part of. This is a crucial factor in optimising their contributions.
The integration of recruitment systems of the UAE and India is set to usher in a new era of human resource advantageousness and fair play. Given the deep and lasting bonds of amity and friendship between the two countries, this transparency is an additional accelerator in their onward journey towards greater mutual harmony and progress.
