When an expatriate worker dies in the Gulf, the family’s first question is not about grief. It is simple, practical, and terrifying: Whom do we call?
Before shock recedes, relatives navigate a labyrinth. Hospital to police station. Police station to consulate. Consulate to airline counter. Death certificates, post-mortems, embalming permits, cargo bookings. Each step demands new documents. Each document raises new questions. And for every question, there is no single answer.
This is not a story about an individual family’s tragedy. It is a story about institutional failure on a massive scale.
The infrastructure exists. The Indian Consulate in Dubai and northern Emirates maintains a 24-hour emergency line for deaths of Indian nationals. NORKA runs an Assisted Body Repatriation Scheme with cost reimbursement. The Kerala government has protocols. Approved social organizations operate across the emirates. The UAE Labour Law, Federal Law No. 33/2021, explicitly mandates employer responsibility in certain cases. The system, in theory, is comprehensive.
Yet families still don’t know these services exist. They still depend on knowing the right person, calling the right number, remembering the right organization. In moments of profound shock, this burden falls on those least equipped to bear it.
The real problem, then, is not absence of services. It is the absence of a coordinated mechanism that connects these services into a single, comprehensible response.
Why the System Fragments
Kerala’s economy has depended on expatriate remittances for decades. The official calculation speaks in numbers: how many workers, how many billion rupees, what percentage of state GDP. But behind each statistic stands a person who left home to support a family, who sent money home in good years and bad, who expected to return home one day.
The government has never prepared for what happens when that person dies.
When a migrant worker dies, the situation is treated as an isolated crisis. Each time it happens, agencies respond ad hoc. The consulate acts within its mandate. The local authority responds to its jurisdiction. NORKA processes applications within its criteria. But no single entity owns the family’s experience. No one tracks the overall process. No authority ensures the family receives clear guidance at each stage.
The result is predictable. Families run between offices. They search for answers on WhatsApp groups and Google. They reach out to social workers and community organizers who, out of compassion and without institutional support, fill the gap.
This system of individual heroism is not sustainable. More importantly, it is unjust.
The Social Worker Problem
The strength of the expatriate community lies in its solidarity. When someone dies, social workers appear. Community organizations mobilize. Volunteers spend weeks handling paperwork, making calls, navigating bureaucracies. Often they receive no payment. Sometimes they do, and this becomes controversial.
But consider what this means. A family in crisis depends on finding the right person. A grieving widow must know someone connected to someone who knows a social worker. An elderly parent must navigate through informal networks to locate help. The quality of assistance depends entirely on personal circumstances and connections.
What is remarkable is not the compassion of these volunteers. It is that the government has abandoned this responsibility to them.
The current arrangement also creates perverse incentives. When social workers compete for credit on social media, claiming to have repatriated a body first, the work becomes about recognition rather than service. When fees are charged without transparency, suspicion grows. These problems are not the fault of individual social workers. They arise from the absence of institutional frameworks.
A system based on personal goodwill cannot be scaled. It cannot be monitored. It cannot ensure equity. If a family lacks connections, if they speak no English, if they cannot navigate bureaucracy, they receive worse service. This is unacceptable.
These are not radical demands. They represent basic standards of administrative transparency and efficiency.
The Employer Question
UAE labour law is clear. Under Federal Law No. 33/2021, Article 15(3), in certain circumstances employers must bear the cost of preparing and transporting a deceased worker’s body. Yet many employers remain unaware of this obligation. Many families do not know to demand it.
This legal responsibility deserves enforcement. When an employer resists repatriation costs, there should be a mechanism to adjudicate claims. The case tracking system should enable families to simultaneously pursue insurance claims, recover outstanding salary, secure gratuity, and arrange repatriation. These are interconnected. Yet currently they are handled separately, if at all.
For low-wage workers, these financial entitlements often exceed repatriation costs. Yet families struggle to recover them. An institutional mechanism should ensure that a worker’s final contribution to his family is delivered intact.
## Why Governments Delay
The ultimate question remains: Why have governments not established this system?
Part of the answer is bureaucratic inertia. No ministry owns this problem completely. The consulate sees it as a welfare matter. The state government sees it as a central government responsibility. Ministries struggle with coordination even within single countries, much less across borders.
Part of the answer is resource constraints. Systems require funding, personnel, and coordination capacity. In an era of strained budgets, migration-related services often receive lower priority than domestic affairs.
But the deeper answer may be political. Organized expatriate communities vote outside their country of origin. They have little direct political power at home. Their problems do not generate headlines unless tragedy strikes. Once scandal recedes from media focus, political will dissipates. The system reverts to its previous state of benign neglect.
This explains why NORKA’s excellent Assisted Body Repatriation Scheme remains unknown to many families who qualify. It explains why the consulate’s 24-hour emergency line exists but is not widely publicized. These services are established. They simply are not made visible, accessible, or coordinated.
A System That Respects Dignity
The final journey is not merely about transporting a body. It is about ensuring that a deceased worker’s rights and dignity are honored. His family should not be left searching for information at a moment of profound grief. They should not need to know a specific individual to access help. They should not wonder whether they are being overcharged or whether all their rights are being honored.
A coordinated system would cost relatively little to establish. It would require no new institutions, only better links between existing ones. It would require no radical policy changes, only clarification of current laws and consistent application of them.
What it requires is political will. It requires acknowledging that an expatriate worker, living outside his nation, deserves the same dignity in death as any citizen at home. It requires recognizing that if Kerala’s economy depends on expatriate labour, the state has an obligation to ensure that labour receives institutional support.
Currently, that obligation is met only through the personal compassion of individual social workers. That is not good enough. In a functioning state, it should not be necessary.
A system where the pathway home is clear, transparent, and consistently available across all emirates would not eliminate grief. It would eliminate unnecessary cruelty. It would replace the current dependence on personal connections with institutional responsibility.
That is the system Kerala and India must build.
