The international media has been awash with reports of hundreds of workers, most of them from Nepal, Bangladesh and India, dying during the construction of stadiums and other facilities for the 2022 FIFA World Cup.
However a look at migration data suggests that the number of deaths does not necessarily suggest the kind of crisis that is being described.
Since Qatar won the bid to host the World Cup at the end of 2010, construction began from 2011 onwards. According to data from the Ministry of External Affairs submitted in response to a question asked in the Rajya Sabha, 1093 Indians have died in Qatar from 2011 to May 2015.
While this, as the international media has pointed out, is a large number, it is the context of the fact that there were 5.8 lakh Indian migrants in Qatar as of 2013, according to the UN Migration Database.
Annual death rate
In 2014, the year with the highest Indian deaths in Qatar in the recent past, the annual death rate among Indian migrants in Qatar works out to 0.5 per thousand population.
In contrast, the death rate among Indian males aged 15-59 – which corresponds most closely to the demographics of Indian migrants in Qatar – was 4.1 per 1000 population in 2013, according to data from the Registrar General of India.
That is over eight times as much as the death rate of Indians in Qatar.
Moreover, the figure for deaths in Qatar is of all Indians, and not only those working on FIFA sites, and from all causes.
Higher numbers
Many other countries with large numbers of Indian migrants have substantially higher death rates for this group than Qatar. The United Arab Emirates which has the largest number of Indian migrants in the world, has a marginally higher death rate, while Saudi Arabia saw nearly seven times as many Indian deaths as Qatar in the same period.
However the Indian death rate is still significantly higher than the death rate for Indian migrants in all countries with significant migrant populations.
One caveat, however, is that Indian migrants, even to Gulf countries, are likely to be slightly better off than the general Indian population – merely attempting such migration requires some amount of wherewithal, says Dr P Arokiasamy, Professor in the Department of Development Studies at the International Institute of Population Sciences in Mumbai.
“Definitely, it is not the poorest in the villages who are migrating to these countries. Also, those who go must be having some physical ability to withstand adverse conditions,” Dr. Arokiasamy said.
Moreover, the better disease environment and reduced likelihood of accidents in better developed countries means that one should expect fewer deaths of Indians in those countries than in India, he added.
