India’s most valuable export: Workers

New Delhi plans to help countries like Germany and Japan overcome their labour shortages

- ALEX TRAVELLI

Students study Japanese in New Delhi. Such schools offer language classes to students who hope to get jobs abroad.

India has a teeming population of able-bodied workers, tens of millions more than its employers can accommodate. Many other countries have the opposite problem: more jobs than workers.

Today, across the Indian government and business sector, a movement is gaining steam to begin exporting more workers. The idea, which economists call labour mobility, is to connect young Indians to companies in places with shrinking populations where labour shortages are holding back growth.

The challenge for India and its partners overseas is a growing opposition to immigration in many countries. Officials are trying to craft policies to make it easier to move Indian workers abroad swiftly while ensuring they have viable paths to return home.

On Oct 9, India's foreign ministry announced draft legislation for an Overseas Mobility Bill to replace the Emigration Act of 1983. The text proposes to help Indian citizens connect with the “global workplace,’ paying special attention to ensuring workers’ “safe and orderly return, and reintegration of returnees.”

New Delhi has quietly signed labour mobility agreements with at least 20 countries over the past half-dozen years — in Europe and Asia, including the Persian Gulf — all with developed economies and most without much history of hiring Indian workers.

“My dream is to go to Japan,’ said Vanlal Peka, the son of a pig farmer in Mizoram, a hilly region on India's border with Myanmar. The dream took him to a warren of glass-walled rooms in a New Delhi basement, where he studies Japanese at the Furusawa Academy. Mr Peka, 21, wants to win a new visa for semiskilled foreign workers and become an auto mechanic in Japan by April.