KATHMANDU, NEPAL – Swarms of people enter a 12-story building standing 100 meters off the road at a business complex in Gurgaon, a city in northern India. At the gate of this building stands Gopal Upreti. The 20-year-old Nepalese security guard stomps his boot on the floor, salutes the passersby, then opens and closes the gate for them.
“I had acute financial problems at my house,” says, Upreti, who is from Jhapa, a district in eastern Nepal. “Therefore, I came here for employment.”
Upreti migrated to India five years ago in search of employment. He grew up in a small house with his six family members on a tiny plot of land in Jhapa, where his father worked hard to support them. Upreti and his two brothers attended school during the day and helped with the chores at home during the morning and evening.
Upreti says his family had to borrow money for every financial need, from his sisters’ marriages to an operation for his mother. But they struggled to pay back the loans, so he dropped out of school at the age of 15 to find a job.
Upreti was unable to find work locally, so he migrated to India with friends. He washed dishes in a restaurant in Delhi where he earned 2,000 rupees ($23) per month. Soon he became a cook, then a waiter.
After two years, he brought his savings home to Nepal and partially paid off his family’s debt. When he returned to Delhi, he trained to be a security guard during his off hours and eventually left his job in the restaurant.
He has now been a security guard in Gurgaon for five years. He paid off his family’s debts and was even able to send his family money to buy a television, a cell phone, a radio, clothes and shoes.
But when the milking buffalo his family depended on for their livelihood died, they had to borrow 30,000 rupees ($350) to buy a new one.
Upreti says he is now working to pay off the new debt. He plans to migrate to one of the Gulf countries to work as a security guard at a higher salary.
“Born as humans, we have to do our share of hard work,” Upreti says.
Experts on labor migration say that India draws the largest number of young, unskilled Nepalese workers because of the countries' open border. Young people working in India say that poverty and a lack of employment at home forced them to migrate to earn money to support their families. But a lack of government regulation of migration to India for work creates various risks for migrants, including robbery, human trafficking and HIV transmission. Nepal’s government has agreed to draft a new law to prepare and protect citizens working in India.
Unemployment is highest in Nepal among youth ages 20 to 24, according to the Nepal Labour Force Survey of 2008. And 46 percent of the youth labor force is underemployed.
Nearly 2 million Nepalese citizens are living in foreign countries, according to the preliminary results of the 2011 population census.
The remittances sent by this population amounted to 330.9 billion rupees ($3.8 billion) from June 2011 to June 2012, according to the Department of Foreign Employment’s annual report. This accounted for 21.2 percent of the gross domestic product.
But these numbers are low estimates, says Ganesh Gurung, a sociologist and the founding chairman of Nepal Institute of Development Studies, a nongovernmental research organization.
“The largest number of Nepalese migrants are in India,” Gurung says.
Estimates of the number of Nepalese working in India vary from 2 million to 8 million, Gurung says. But there is no official data because of the open border between Nepal and India.
Because of the open border, unskilled laborers can move from one country to another for work without any legal document or passport, says Gurung, who has researched migration issues since 1990. Nepalese men and women migrate to India for jobs ranging from domestic work to coal mining.
Slow economic growth in Nepal as a result of political deadlock and instability has stymied job creation, Gurung says. On the other hand, strong economic growth in India has created employment opportunities for even unskilled workers.
Those living in villages bordering India migrate to different cities in India as seasonal workers, says Arjun Karki, section officer at the Foreign Employment Promotion Board, the government body charged with managing the foreign employment of Nepalese citizens. They come back to Nepal either during the festivals or to sow and harvest their crops.
“In some cases, people go across the border in the morning for work and come back in the evening,” Karki says. “It is difficult to keep record.”
Like Upreti, Jeevan Magar, 35, also works in Gurgaon. Originally from the Makwanpur district in central Nepal, Magar works as a tractor driver in India.
“My birthplace is in Nepal, but my workplace is in India,” Magar says.
Magar married at age 22 and inherited a half-acre of land from his father. But the land did not yield enough crops to support his family.
There was a growing trend among the youth in his village to migrate to Malaysia for employment, but he did not have enough money to apply for a passport or to travel abroad. So instead, Magar migrated to India in search of employment in 2002.
“I did not have any choice for means of survival in Nepal,” he says. “Therefore, I came here.”
Magar, who has been working in India for 10 years, worked for a coal mining company in northeastern India for the first five years. He sent most of his earnings to his family in Nepal.
He says he never felt he was far from home because the mine owner and workers were all Nepalese. But he eventually decided that mining was too risky and wouldn’t provide future security for his family.
So he learned how to drive a tractor. He now works from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. transporting gravel, sand and cement and continues to send remittances home to Nepal.
Foreign migrants’ remittances provide great financial support to the economy, Gurung says. But there are also cons. In a foreign country, workers may have to share small rooms, engage in risky work or not receive their salary on time.
Transporting remittances home can also be risky. Lekhnath Khatiwada, 28, a resident of Ilam district in eastern Nepal, says he saved as much money as he could working in India as a shepherd.
He used to send his money to his family in Nepal through friends and relatives who traveled back and forth from India. Thinking he could do it on his own, he headed to Nepal in March 2012 with 50,000 rupees ($575). But someone robbed him on his way.
“I had saved at the cost of my food requirements,” Khatiwada says. “And it was all stolen.”
The open border also enables traffickers to lure less educated women and youth and sell them into Indian brothels, says Achyut Kumar Nepal, the communication officer of Maiti Nepal, a nongovernmental organization that fights human trafficking.
Foreign employment can also weaken the family structure. As more men than women migrate to India for work, the women must bear all domestic responsibilities, Gurung says. Children also lack discipline without their fathers at home.
Sexual urges from being separated from spouses combined with easy access to female sex workers in India also lead to infidelity and unsafe sexual practices, Gurung says. This results in the transmission of HIV, syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases. Tuberculosis is also rampant among Nepalese workers who live in unhygienic and crowded dwellings.
“In some areas of Far-Western Nepal, HIV/AIDS is also known as ‘Bombay disease,’” Gurung says.
Of the migrants who spent three months to three years in India, 1.5 percent were infected with HIV and 1.5 percent with syphilis, according to a 2010 sample survey of 550 workers in Nepal’s Mid- and Far-Western regions by the National Centre for AIDS and STD Control. The center educates migrants about HIV and distributes condoms to them for when they visit sex workers, says Keshav Deuba, a consultant at the center.
Magar says he spent the first few months in India thinking about his wife. But then he started going to commercial sex establishments in India with his friends.
“I am taking all this hardships for my family,” he says with a laugh. “I have to have fun sometimes.”
He says he learned about using condoms from a local nongovernmental organization. But if he doesn’t have one, he will have unprotected sexual intercourse.
“I have never taken any test for HIV,” he says. “I think I do not have it.”
But this has become a problem for spouses back in Nepal.
Sita Sharma, 28, a mother of two children in Baglung district in western Nepal, says she contracted HIV from her husband when he came home for a holiday from Mumbai, where he had moved for work.
“I am paying for the mistakes my husband did for his amusement,” says Sharma, a public relations officer for a nongovernmental organization working to help people living with HIV.
When Upreti’s parents found a suitable woman for him to marry, her parents refused to marry their daughter to a man who had worked in Delhi or Mumbai. He says the parents asked for his blood report.
“I have not been involved in anything wrong,” Upreti says. “But people just talk bad things.”
Although Nepalese have been going to India for employment for years, Nepal has no foreign employment policy with regard to India, says Dinesh Regmi, a reporter for the Kantipur Daily, a Nepali newspaper, who covered migration issues from Qatar for more than five years.
The Foreign Employment Act of 2007 requires foreign employers to offer insurance and orientation training to Nepalese citizens to travel to the 108 countries the government lists as suitable destinations to work abroad. It also requires citizens pursuing foreign employment to obtain a health checkup before departing and pay into the Foreign Employment Welfare Fund, which offers skills training before workers go abroad, emergency financial support while away and job assistance when they return.
But the government has not included India on this list, Regmi says.
“The Nepalese migrants to India, which gave birth to foreign migration, have been neglected, which is very surprising,” Regmi says. “I have not as yet received a proper answer to this question.”
The government doesn’t have any plan on how to rescue workers in India if they become hurt, for example, he says. For countries on the list, the local agency in Nepal representing the foreign employer is obligated to offer insurance in case of trouble or accidents.
Gurung says he has been lobbying the government that even if it doesn’t make any policy for workers migrating to India, it should at least provide a minimum three-month training about the work they will be involved in plus basic training about health and sanitation.
“It would have increased the remittance for the government,” he says. “They opposed my proposal.”
But Karki of the Foreign Employment Promotion Board says that training for all workers going to India is neither possible nor practical. Moreover, if these workers were trained and skilled, it wouldn’t be necessary for them to go to India.
But the government has failed to incorporate the people migrate to India across the open border for work, says Som Luitel, the chairman of the People Forum for Human Rights, a nongovernmental organization.
Luitel says he has been advocating for the necessary policies to protect Nepalese workers in India. The government has agreed to draft a new law that includes orientation classes for the migrants, provisions for health and security and assistance with the safe transfer of money.
But the Constituent Assembly responsible for making such a law is currently dissolved, and the date for a new on has not yet been scheduled.
Although there is a need to make policies for migration in India, no work has been done yet, says Buddhi Bahadur Khadka, spokesman for the Ministry of Labour and Employment.
