The recession & the lahure

Ekraj Ghimire hadn’t figured he’d be back home this soon. When he left for Dubai eight months ago, to work as a food-delivery hand in a catering company, he thought he’d be in the Gulf for the long haul. But the recession that laid waste to so many businesses around the world had snuck up on Dubai just before Ghimire got there, and when he landed in the emirate the recession was already deepening.

Before last year, Dubai, riding a stellar 15 percent annual growth rate for six successive years, was the most happening place on earth. During the period, the emirate awed the world with its ambitious projects—the world’s tallest building, the biggest shopping mall with an indoor snow resort, and other gargantuan projects only the insanely rich can dream of building.

But when the seismic shocks of the global recession reached Dubai, the once-booming property sector shuddered to a near-halt, and that, coupled with a drop in oil prices, ended the economic boom. The real estate sector sustained the biggest hits and then created knock-on effects on trade, tourism and finance. The expats started leaving in droves, hotels started closing down, the catering industry started laying off people like Ghimire and the real estate companies sent home their foreign hired hands.

Ghimire is in Gaighat now, in worse shape today than he was in before he left: he hasn’t recouped the loan he’d taken out to get to the Gulf, and he doesn’t have a job either. The past few months have seen thousands like Ghimire, considered temporary help and treated as if they were the recession’s collateral damage, return home. Some of the host governments have tightened their foreign-worker inflows—the UAE government, for example, has decided to cut its number of foreign workers by 45 percent; and on the Eastern front, Malaysia has sent planeloads of Nepalis home. This year has already seen a 12 percent drop in the overall number of Nepali workers going abroad to work. If the trend continues, Nepal will soon see its ranks of returnees swell to beyond dangerous levels.

It’s not just blue-collar Nepali workers like Ghimire who’ve been tripped up by the recession’s terrible shudders. Many white-collar Nepali hopefuls, especially recent college grads in the West, where the recession’s epicentres lie, have seen their dreams dissipate. Pawan Sharma, a chartered accountant in London, has not been able get into the promised land of business and finance and is getting by on odd-end jobs. Sudhir Shrestha, a fresh MBA grad in an East Coast city in the U.S., says that he and other Nepalis today spend inordinate amounts of time sending out their resumes to head-hunting agencies, waiting for a callback, which never materialises, and worrying about finding entry slots in the market. These turns of events shouldn’t be surprising. The U.K.’s unemployment rate hovers somewhere around 10 percent of the workforce, and many analysts think that the U.S. figures have already overshot that mark. Things are so dismal in the U.S. that many recent Nepali grads there have not been able to find even blue-collar work—at gas stations and such—to tide over the times; many have had to enroll in master’s degree programmes just to remain legal.
The short-term losses from the dip in remittance that Nepal will see will obviously be unpleasant enough—remittance has propped up the economy here for well over a decade. But the long-term problems created by such numbers returning home—unless the returnees are gainfully employed when they get here—could make for a huge unemployment crisis in the country.

“There needs to be a fundamental shift in the way we view this problem,” says sociologist Ganesh Gurung. “We have only focused on sending our workers abroad, instead of searching for ways to create jobs for them here.”

But that’s the point that many in the government don’t seem to be getting. The game-plan here still seems to be a short-term one: to ship as many Nepalis as the government can to other countries. But that means that Nepali workers will always be at the mercy of the troughs and crests of the financial cycles around the globe. And when the troughs get too deep and lead to a recession, foreign workers like the Nepalis are the first to get cut.

If the government, instead of continuing with their current game-plan, were to focus on bulking up the basic infrastructure here (roads, the electricity
network, health, education—every sector here is in shambles), that might create enough jobs for both blue-collar workers and white-collar professionals to keep them busy. And instead of limping around the globe as temporary workers, Nepalis might start finding fulfilling, lifelong careers at home.

With inputs from Soham Pradhan in Dubai & Ramesh Gurung in New York (Source: eKantipur)