Consulate helps jailed worker return home

Dubai: Harijan Gopalram was sent behind bars within minutes of his setting foot in Dubai four years ago.

But his story had a happy ending when he sat fastening his seat belt in the Air India flight to Jaipur on Friday, leaving the country for good after serving more than 16 months in the central prison.

The 42-year-old worker from the Sikar district of Rajasthan, India, would have spent years in jail for his inability to pay Dh27,000 for damaging hospital equipment, if not for the help of the Indian Community Welfare Committee (ICWC), the social service arm of the Indian Consulate in Dubai.

"I don't know whether I am still dreaming. I have been waiting for this day clutching to nothing but prayers of seeing my wife and my three children," Gopalram told Gulf News when he came to meet Sanjay Verma, the Consul General.

Disturbed state of mind

Gopalram was arrested in October 2006, the day he landed in Dubai after he behaved in a state of disarray, and tried to walk through a glass door and broke it at the Dubai International Airport, said K.Kumar, Convener of ICWC. The illiterate worker who was reportedly in a disturbed state of mind also had caused damages to hospital equipment when he was admitted to Rashid Hospital. After serving a month in jail and paying a Dh2,000 fine, he was released with the help of his company, where he worked as a mason for more than two years.

Kumar said Gopalram got into trouble again at the airport when he was going home on vacation in February 2009. "He was arrested at the airport again and he was told that he still had some charges pending against him in connection with the hospital incident after his arrest in 2006.

"It was during our jail visits that his case came to our notice. Mohammad Sheriff, from Gopalram's hometown, paid Dh4,000, and the rest of the amount was raised by ICWC to facilitate his release," said Kumar.

Gopalram is the first in the line to benefit from the ICWC's initiative to help the release of a total of 13 prisoners who are in the UAE prisons for non-criminal offences. ICWC has embarked on the project to commemorate its 10th anniversary, and has identified a total of 13 cases.

A still-bewildered Gopalram said he thought he would never come out prison as there was no way he or his family could raise the money. "I had paid nearly Dh100,000 to an agent for my visa and in these two years that I worked for the company, all I could was to pay back my debt. I could not even attend the funeral of my mother who died last year.

"Now my family is just waiting for my return and I want to spend the rest of my life working in my own village," he said.

Applauding the work of ICWC, Sanjay Verma said it is a praiseworthy endeavour to intervene in such cases which otherwise would have fallen through the cracks of limited means and bad fortune.