The maybe-escape from Benghazi

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Anita Devi, 48, barely eats two meals a day. Her leaky roofed two-bedroom house in Sihorwa village in Uttar Pradesh’s Gorakhpur district requires urgent repair. But she cannot stop thinking about her 22-year-old son Vishal Sahani, who left for Libya in June 2023, for what appeared to be a well-paying job at the Libyan Cement Company in Benghazi, the war-torn North African country’s second largest city.

“I think of him all the time. On the phone, when he tells me he often goes hungry, my heart sinks,” Devi says, her eyes welling up, as she looks forlornly onto the dirt road that leads to the village from her house.

Two of Devi’s family members are at the factory in Benghazi, “one of the largest cement production companies in Libya” founded in 1968 with a total production capacity of 2.9 million tons, says the company’s website. The Sahanis are among 16 Indian men, 13 of whom are from the Gorakhpur district. They have been at the factory for times ranging between one and five years. The other three are from western Bihar.

Their stories are starkly similar: rural distress, poverty, and joblessness leading them to traps laid out by a wide network of fake employment agents working across the region who prey on the vulnerabilities of such communities by promising them lucrative jobs largely in West Asia and North Africa.

With prison-like conditions, work hours that stretch to 16-hour days, and odd and unscheduled shifts, their passports are confiscated on arrival in the guise of ‘updating their visa status’. For the past four months, these men have been without work or wages, following a confrontation with their ‘contractor’ Abu Bakkr, a Libyan national, over unscheduled shifts and extra work hours.

Two of the men say Bakkr facilitated their travel from Dubai to Benghazi. Bakkr had obtained tourist visas and not work permits, which could have allowed them legal status in Libya, but such permits are expensive, says Vijay Sahani, 31. His younger brother, Rajkumar, 28, had travelled to work at the cement factory in 2022. Rajkumar had suggested Vishal join him.

Responsibility and limited choices

Devi’s family belongs to the Nishad community in U.P. They are categorised as Other Backward Classes but have been demanding that they be identified as a Scheduled Caste. This demand was supported by former Chief Minister and Samajwadi Party leader Akhilesh Yadav but was stalled by the courts.

The Sahanis are marginal farmers who own just half an acre of land that hardly fetches them ₹5,000 a month. “It does not even support our basic needs. Vishal’s father has an alcohol problem,” says Devi, as she explains the reasons that forced her son to seek greener pastures.

Vishal dropped out of school after Class 10 and began working on the family farm. In Uttar Pradesh, traditionally, sons must finance their sisters’ weddings, and as Devi’s only son, he began to feel the pressure of getting his third sister married. He is one of five children.

“We are forced to take loans from local moneylenders for marriages or health issues at high interest rates, as agriculture has become unsustainable,” Devi says.

In eastern U.P.’s villages, local moneylenders charge anywhere between 5% and 10% a month on the principal. They generally lend without documentation or a paper trail, exploiting the vulnerabilities of impoverished rural families. The enticement of earning ₹40,000 a month was enough for Vishal to travel 6,000 kilometres west to a country he knew nothing about.

The extended Sahani family is in deep financial crisis. “We took a loan of more than ₹80,000 from a moneylender at 10% monthly interest to finance Rajkumar’s travel. Now it seems like a debt trap with our lives at stake,” says Vijay.

Youth working in a field in the village Sihorwa village.
| Photo Credit:
SANDEEP SAXENA

He adds that an acquaintance — Raju Chouhan, from neighbouring Deoria district — who had worked in Libya for 12 years and is among those at the cement factory, “facilitated the travel and the job opportunity,” says Vijay, who himself worked for four years in Dubai as an iron welder and foreman before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Vijay says thousands of unemployed youths from low-income families of the region who lack skilled training or graduate degrees, work as welders, plasterers, ceramic tilers, foremen, mine workers, drivers and more, in factories and industries in West Asia and North Africa, or WANA.

“I was able to construct a ‘pucca’ house of two rooms and finance my sister’s wedding with my savings from the five years I spent in Dubai,” says Vijay, explaining how such stints in WANA countries help low-income families. He says the family received between ₹35,000-₹40,000 from his brother Rajkumar every two months “for a major part of the period” since January 2023.

The unemployment challenge

U.P., a State of roughly 240 million people with a per capita income of ₹70,792 measured in terms of Per Capita Net State Domestic Product (NSDP) in 2021-22 according to the Government of India’s reply in the Rajya Sabha, is three times lower than developed States like Maharashtra with ₹2,15,233, in the same period.

While the latest available annual Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) report compiled by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation estimates U.P.’s unemployment rate (UR) at 2.4% in 2022-23, critics have questioned its methodology. They say it includes data for unpaid work, which does not accurately capture the state of unemployment in the country. The grim picture of unemployment in the State can be gauged by the fact that more than 43 lakh youths appeared for 60,244 constable posts in the police examination in 2024.

The State has witnessed a rise in unregistered recruitment agencies, many of them in the Gorakhpur region, attracting overseas job seekers through manipulative, and often fake advertisements. “People from low-income families fall in the trap of such agencies and get cheated,” says Mujahid Husain Khan, president, U.P. chapter of the Indian Personnel Export Promotion Council, an association of recruiting agents.

Khan says he has written multiple letters to U.P. government officials including to the Deputy Inspector General (DIG), Gorakhpur, in the past couple of months seeking action against such fake recruitment agencies. The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA)’s eMigrate portal mentions only 36 registered agencies/recruiting agents that promote ‘safe and legal migration’ in the Gorakhpur Administrative Region consisting of four districts in eastern U.P.

While the eMigrate portal mentions only 22 registered agencies in Gorakhpur district alone, when The Hindu visited the Singhariya locality near Gorakhpur’s All India Institute of Medical Sciences, there were at least two dozen training and testing centres that promise to facilitate jobs in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Their charges range between ₹10,000 and ₹1 lakh, depending on the nature of work and salary structure. The staff at the centres say engineers and foremen will be called for an interview this month. They did not disclose any information about their registration status or details of the prospective employers.

Rajesh Mani, the director of Manav Seva Sansthan, a Gorakhpur-based non-profit that works on socio-economic development, has been petitioning the MEA seeking the government’s intervention to extradite the 16 men in Benghazi. But he says aside from assurances that he received for his initial letter dated October 19, he hasn’t seen any action.

During his weekly briefing on December 20, MEA spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal had acknowledged the problem, saying, “We reached out to our workers through our community there.” The Indian Embassy in Tripoli, which was reopened in late July 2024 after being shut for five years, is “closely following” the situation, he had said.

In the past four months, the Indian workers have been supported by their Bangladeshi counterparts at the cement factory. They have been buying them groceries and food, the money for which has been repatriated to their families back in Bangladesh through the Indian workers’ relatives in Dubai, says Mithilesh Vishwakarma, another worker from Gorakhpur who travelled to Benghazi in September last year.

“I have also sent ₹40,000 to my son, but he is in serious trouble, and we want him back,” says Ramesh Chandra Vishwakarma, 26-year-old Mithilesh’s father, who is also from Sihorwa, the same village as Vishal and Rajkumar Sahani.

Ramesh recalls how his son — an athlete — wanted to join the police force after he graduated with a BSc degree. But the family’s debts of more than ₹4 lakh spent on Mithilesh’s younger sister’s wedding led him to look for better-paying jobs abroad. “We used to receive ₹32,000 a month in our account, which helped us pay off ₹2.5 lakh that we had borrowed from the money lender at 6% monthly interest rate,” Ramesh says.

Ramesh and Vikash Vishwakarma, the father and the brother of Mithilesh, who is stuck in Benghazi, Libya. 

Ramesh and Vikash Vishwakarma, the father and the brother of Mithilesh, who is stuck in Benghazi, Libya. 
| Photo Credit:
SANDEEP SAXENA

He is a welder — one of the traditional occupations of the Vishwakarma caste — and runs his shop from home. The family owns half an acre of land and earns about ₹15,000 during peak harvest season from it. Ramesh is a Bharatiya Janata Party booth-level president. He says he took the matter to his local MP and Union Minister of State for Rural Development Kamlesh Paswan, who took cognisance of the matter and in turn wrote to the Minister of External Affairs, S. Jaishankar.

Fragmented landholdings, a collapse of agriculture, the lack of awareness of global events, and the paucity of skilled education avenues have led the men of this region to pursue work abroad. Gorakhpur’s Gross District Domestic Product at constant price in the financial year 2020-21 was less than one-fourth of Gautam Buddha Nagar district, which abuts neighbouring Delhi.

Waiting for an escape

Mani, from Manav Seva Sansthan, says Indians from eastern U.P. and western Bihar who travelled for work led by similar fake recruitment agents have been rescued from other war-torn African countries like Somalia. He also gives examples of dozens of workers being brought back from the Gulf and other countries with his organisation playing a key role.

Lalit Mohan Prajapati, from Dhanni Patti village of Kushinagar district, is one of two evacuated from Somalia in October 2023. “An acquaintance took me along with him through a Mumbai-based agent, who promised us better wages at a metal bar making factory in Somalia,” says Prajapati, who spent almost a year between 2022-2023 in the war-torn country.

Recollecting his ordeal, he says that cooped up in the factory premises, he had no idea of his whereabouts. “Outside the factory there was firing every week, while inside, there was no work and no wages,” Prajapati says. He was not aware of the protracted internecine wars in Somalia and went there lured by the prospect of being able to save and repatriate ₹50,000 every month.

In October last year, U.P. law enforcement authorities sent out circulars to field staff asking them to act against unauthorised recruitment agents. They were to ensure that those who are registered follow protocols like obtaining enrolment letters from the Protector General of Emigrants division within the MEA, and to adhere to the rules specified in The Emigration Act, 1983.

Meanwhile, following The Hindu’s reporting, the 16 workers were shifted out of the cement factory on New Year’s Eve, to two rooms in the backyard of Bakkr’s house. “At first, we were told it’s for a medical check-up. We were hustled into two buses with all our belongings, and they brought us here,” says Mithilesh over the phone.

The Indian Embassy in Tripoli has assured the workers of a return “within weeks”. The Libyan authorities have promised safety, food, and water. Tabassum Mansoor, a non-resident Indian social worker, has been following up on the workers. “She told us the documentation to enable us to leave has been done, and that only buying the tickets is taking time,” Mithilesh says. In response to a question from The Hindu, the MEA reiterated their December 20 response and said that India is currently working with Libyan authorities to process ‘exit cards’ for the workers, which would enable their repatriation. However, they did not give a definite timeline on when the repatriation will take place.

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