The government of Dubai calls its squalid workers camps, such as Sonapur and Al-Quoz, “temporary workforce residential complexes.” As pointed out by New York-based Human Rights Watch, the GoD’s call for “adequate” housing leaves the definition ambiguous. While some employers have improved sanitary conditions and eased overcrowding, the government has not publicised the list of over 100 hundred companies that have violated existing labour laws.

The plight of women domestic workers from South Asia has been even less visible. HRW has noted that women are “at a particular risk of abuse, including food deprivation, forced confinement, and physical or sexual abuse.” The standard contract does not provide equal protection for female domestic workers, and still contains no limits on work hours, break days, workers’ compensation, or overtime pay. Women workers can look forward to one month of paid vacation every two years.

In India, families have borne a heavy burden in the U.A.E.’s schemes for “living the life.” Nearly all foreign workers travel alone, leaving families behind. As more men with limited social mobility leave their countries, the “Dubai chalo” syndrome has created negative sociopsychological effects on individuals and families, resulting from social isolation, culture shock, harsh working conditions, and the sudden increase in personal wealth. Indian women often gather the necessary funds to support migration, and male emigration means that wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters who stay behind carry the weight of the duties both inside and outside the home.

The U.A.E.’s rapacious energy for building hyperbolic-sized structures conveys a feeling of invincibility. Yet without extensive structural changes to enable enforcement of human and labour rights for over a million migrant workers, most of them Indian, the state’s claim toward advancement can only be described as illusory and exploitative.

... contd.