• Thursday, March 28, 2024

News

‘Bangladeshi workers in Maldives are at risk of COVID-19’

By: PramodKumar

About 100,000 migrant workers in Maldives, including many Bangladeshis, are at added risk from Covid-19, Human Rights Watch has said.

According to the Maldives’ health authorities, as of March 27 there were five active cases of Covid-19, two of them tourists and one a Maldivian returning from UK, the global rights group said.

“But the Maldives faces another big challenge. The other two cases of Covid-19 reported were migrant workers. There are about 100,000 migrant workers in the Maldives, mostly from Bangladesh, making up roughly 25 percent of the islands’ total population,” it said.

This population is vulnerable to seeing a much larger number of cases because they live in congested shared quarters and do work that does not make it possible to practice strict social distancing, it added.

HRW said although employers in the Maldives are legally obligated to provide all migrant workers with health insurance, coverage is often minimal and many are not informed they have insurance at all.

Employers also illegally confiscate workers’ papers, making it difficult for them to obtain healthcare. As a result, migrants are frequently forced to pay more than the citizens for medical services.

Undocumented workers are especially vulnerable, the HRW article added.

Related Stories