17/08/2021 (1) New Message! × (/) 308 Chandan Kumar Mandal (/Author/Chandan-Kumar-Mandal) Published at : August 15, 2021 Updated at : August 15, 2021 01:28 Kathmandu Gopal Pariyar, 42, has lived toiling hard in the Persian Gulf region for more than 12 years. Pariyar, a migrant worker from Pokhara, Kaski, has been trapped in circular migration—a phenomenon in which a migrant is shuffling repeatedly between home and labour destination countries. Pariyar stayed in Qatar from 2007 to 2012. Then he went to Saudi Arabia and stayed there until 2016. After a break of nearly one year, he again headed back to Qatar in September 2017. “I consider myself unfortunate. I never had any easy jobs all these years,” lamented Pariyar. “Every time, I had to work under the scorching sun. Nor could I make good money.” In Saudi Arabia, he worked as a marble mason which included cutting, tooling and setting marble slabs on the floors and walls of buildings. In Qatar, he was loading and unloading goods for a monthly income of Qatari Riyal 600, excluding food. His second stint in Qatar was the most painful, he says. Although he had applied for an electrician job through a Pokhara-based recruiting agency, he was given the job of a helper at one of the project sites of Doha Metro. He had paid Rs120,000 for the job. “As an employee of Abantia Tempo, one of the subcontractors of the Doha Metro project, I was working at the firefighting section,” said Pariyar. “One can imagine how difficult such jobs can be. I had to manage everything with my basic monthly salary of Qatari Riyal 900 [Rs29,355], including my food.” For Pariyar, who had been carrying on with the job of taking care of a six-member family back home in Nepal, the Covid-19 pandemic came as a personal disaster last year. He was deported to Nepal in March, 2020. On March 13, when he had gone out with five other fellow Nepali workers to withdraw the money from an ATM, the group was arrested by the local police. “We had no idea that going out was prohibited. The company had not shared any information with us about such a restriction,” said Pariyar. “The police told us that they would release us after Covid-19 test, but took us elsewhere where hundreds of others were rounded up.” Pariyar and his friends could never go back to their camp after the arrest. On March 18, after five days of detention, he was directly deported to Nepal. Pariyar was among more than 400 Nepalis who were (https://kathmandupost.com/national/2020/04/16/qatar-used-coronavirus-pandemicas-a-ruse-to-expel-nepali-migrant-workers-amnesty-international-says)sent back last year after local authorities accused them of not abiding by the government measures enforced to contain the spread of coronavirus (https://kathmandupost.com/national/2020/03/26/nepalis-inqatar-live-in-overcrowded-and-squalid-conditions-even-during-pandemic). https://kathmandupost.com/national/2021/08/15/victims-of-wage-theft-migrant-nepalis-are-losing-hope-of-recovering-their-money?fbclid=IwAR3nj… 2/9

Select target paragraph3