How migrant workers build communities back home

With his UAE pay man supported India family and started a business

NEW DELHI // When Ahmed Arif left the village of Gambhirban in 1994, his ambition was a simple one: to work and earn money in the UAE so that his parents, brothers and sisters at home would not starve.

In the end he did much more than that. Ahmed returned to his Uttar Pradesh village in 2005 and opened a novelty shop that now does a roaring trade. Today, he marvels at that 19-year-old version of himself who first left home.

“I didn’t know I could build an entire life for myself here out of my work there,” he says. “That I could earn enough to not only send my brothers and sisters to school but even to buy this shop.”

Ahmed’s story is not uncommon. Every year the 2.2 million Indians in the UAE send home about Dh55 billion, more than a fifth of India’s remittances of about Dh260bn a year.

In Dubai, Ahmed worked as a carpenter and a mason, securing plac- es on work crews through his brother, who moved there before him. “It was hard work, because you had to learn a lot quickly,” he says. “I learnt to drive. I learnt to fix motors.” With the money he and his brother sent home, their parents were able to fix up their house, buy better food and even start a savings account.

“When I came home, that account was waiting for me,” Ahmed says. “It had around 300,000 rupees [Dh17,700] in it.”

He used the money to rent a shop on Gambhirban’s main road, selling gifts, toys and cosmetics. He knew what to stock because he had seen so many similar shops in the UAE.

“Many of my customers also have relatives in the UAE, so they have money to buy good products,” Ahmed says. “This would never have been the case 20 years ago, I think. Nobody had any money at all then.”

Migrant workers, especially in developing countries, provide an essential boost to their local economies back home, said R Mahadevan, from Chennai, a researcher of migration patterns.

“Unquestionably, families back home are better off and these billions of dollars of remittances improve their way of life in a way that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise,” he said.

In the village of Naganakulam, in the state of Tamil Nadu, Latchumi Vijayan misses her husband every day, but she understands why he chose to take a job in Sharjah.

“There was no work for him here, which is why he left in 2004,” Ms Vijayan says.

He studied only until the eighth grade and when a distant relative suggested that he join a construction crew in the UAE, he jumped at the chance. Thanks to the money she receives every six months from her husband, Ms Vijayan keeps her children in school and cares for her ailing mother.

“It’s difficult, though, and I wish he would come home soon,” she says. “We miss him.”

It was different for Pial Jayasena, who travelled to Dubai from Colombo in Sri Lanka when he was barely 20. He was unmarried, and his parents were not in dire financial straits.

He went to the UAE, he said, out of a sense of adventure and to see something of the world beyond Sri Lanka. “I was a young man,” he says. “It was exciting.” When he came back to Colombo in 2009, he had worked overseas for 12 years, first in the UAE and then in Oman. He found employment as a mechanic and then became a chauffeur. With the money he saved, he bought an autorickshaw on his return to Colombo.

He plays loud Bollywood music as he drives, having acquired a taste for it from his Indian colleagues in the UAE.

“I liked the UAE, and sometimes I miss it,” he says. “There was such camaraderie among us migrants. We were a big, tight community.” He could never have been his own boss, as he is now, without the financial independence that his savings from the UAE afforded him.

“I’d have been working for somebody else, toiling away, not being able to pick my daughter up from school or any of that,” he says. “This is a much better life.”