Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan on Monday sought the Centre’s urgent intervention to ease the United Arab Emirates (UAE) insistence that local police clearance was mandatory for the issuance of work visas from March.
In a communique to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Mr. Vijayan requested him to persuade the UAE authorities to defer their decision for six months till the State government could put in place a reliable mechanism for issuing police clearance certificates (PCC). Kerala relied heavily on NRI remittances.
The migration to the Gulf from Kerala for employment and trade was enormous. The UAE consulate in Thiruvananthapuram alone issued 250 to 300 visas daily.
Thousands of skilled and unskilled workers from Kerala had traditionally found Gulf an ideal destination for work and business.
Mr. Vijayan also raised the spectre of travel agents in other regions of the country diluting the PCC issuance mechanism to push their clients abroad through dubious means. The new regulation could prompt such questionable practices in the short term.
The CM proposed an IT framework involving State and Centre law enforcement agencies to issue police clearance certificates to citizens going abroad for work. He hoped the Centre would be able to negotiate the status quo at least until September.
It would give the State government sufficient time to institute a mechanism whereby the police could verify the background of job aspirants and directly submit their findings to the UAE consulate.
The new regulation has rattled those who have returned from the Gulf pending issuance of new work visas. It has also cast a cloud over the hopes of skilled workers aspiring for employment in UAE.
