Mon 06 July 2020:
The legal and legislative committee of Kuwait’s National Assembly (Parliament) has approved a draft expat quota bill which could result in eight lakh Indians leaving the country.
According to the committee, the draft bill is constitutional and seeks to limit the number of Indians to 15 per cent of the population. It will now be transferred to the respective committee so that a comprehensive plan is created.
The move comes a month after Kuwait’s prime minister had said that the country’s expatriate population should be reduced from 70 to 30 per cent of the total.
“We have a future challenge to redress this imbalance,” Sheikh Sabah Al-Khalid Al-Sabah told a local media publication, and the statement was released by state-run Kuwait News Agency or KUNA.
This means that 800,000 of the 1.45 million Indians resident in Kuwait could be forced to leave the country once the law is implemented later this year.
Indians are Kuwait’s largest expatriate community, sending home some $4.8 billion in remittances in 2018.
Low oil prices and the coronavirus lockdown has hit Kuwait’s economy hard and there has been growing pressure on the government to reduce the number of expatriates in the country and provide more jobs for Kuwaitis.
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