How Gulf migrants may sway Tgana outcome

A year ago, 40-year-old Kurakula Chandraiah returned to his native village Muthyampet in Telangana’s Kamareddy district from Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, where he had worked as a driver for ₹30,000 a month.

- Srinivasa Rao Apparasu

“I went to Riyadh four years ago by spending ₹1.5 lakh. I had no option but to return to India, as my visa expired. Back home, I have no job. I am forced to depend on my wife, who is working as a biology lecturer in a private college,” said Chandraiah, who studied only up to Class X due to poverty.

His argument is that he would not have gone all the way to the Gulf country to earn such a paltry sum had he got an employment opportunity in Telangana. “Even after nine years of Telangana formation, there are no jobs for the people,” Chandraiah lamented.

Like Chandraiah, there are at least half a million people from northern Telangana alone who have been to different parts of the Gulf, including Riyadh, Dubai, Sharjah, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Muscat and Oman, for the past two decades.

“Dubai-Mumbai Boggu Bayi (coal mine)” was the slogan raised by Bharat Rashtra Samithi (then Telangana Rashtra Samithi) to highlight the plight of migrant workers from Telangana during the peak of the movement for a separate state before 2014.