By IANS
New Delhi/Dubai : Around 28,000 Indians have returned to India under a special amnesty scheme launched by the UAE government for illegal expatriates in the Gulf country.
“Around 39,000 applications were made by Indian workers in UAE under the amnesty scheme and as of today 28,000 Indians have come back,” Minister for Overseas Indian Affairs Vayalar Ravi told reporters here Monday.
In June, the UAE cabinet had announced a three-month grace period for foreigners present illegally in the country to regularise their status according to the law or leave the country without penalty.
Ravi said there had been no complaints so far about the way the Indian mission in the Gulf nation processed the applications.
Asked how a similar amnesty scheme launched by Bahrain was progressing, he said: “Our embassy in Bahrain is working on it well.”
The Indian consulate general in Dubai, meanwhile, said in a statement that it had already distributed around 19,100 of the 40,000 Indian passports received from immigration authorities.
Employers in UAE take the passports and other travel documents of foreign workers and deposit them with the UAE immigration department. The passport is usually given back when the job contract expires.
The consulate also said it had delivered 31,500 emergency certificates to Indians so far.
There are around 1.4 million expatriate Indians in the UAE, many of them contract workers. In Dubai alone, Indians comprise over 60 percent of the city’s total population of over 1.4 million.