The newest report, which will serve as the official reference for any policy-making by the Kerala Government relating to non-resident Keralites, comes as a shocker.
It bursts the pomposity of NRKs who have been priding on their numbers (and money power) to be a major force of social and economic change.
All along we believed there were over 3 million Malayalis living abroad in the Middle East, US, Europe and Southeast Asia (the predominant expat Malayali pockets).
There are even more surprises: All along, public perception was that the largest number of expat Malayalis lived in Saudi Arabia. Wrong. The largest number of Malayalis live in the UAE – at 0.573 million – representing 35% of the total. Saudi Arabia has only 0.45 million (28%) – which could come down following the recent labour regulations being implemented in the Kingdom.
The report says that only 5 million Keralites are directly dependent on the expatriate Malayalis – that is about 15% of the total population. Sizeable but not big enough to raise the noise we make of saving the state.
There are no surprises in the fact that Malappuram district has the largest number of expats – at 0.29 million (18%) of which 0.286 million are in the Gulf countries.
American Malayalis, for whom too there are dedicated programmes on our television channels, count for just 0.078 million (a meager 0.23% of the state’s total population), while the UK has some 0.045 million Malayalis.
Nearly 78% of the expat Malayalis – about 1.1 million – are youth (so TV channels, change your programming grid; they just hate your prime time serials). Of the 0.058 million Malayali women living outside, 59% are employed as nurses.
The only place in Kerala that is free of NRIs is Idamalakudy (see photograph).
The census was prepared at an expense of INR1.85 crores.
And now to the questions:
According to reports by the Centre for Development Studies, the number of migrants living abroad in 2011 was 2.28 million. The Centre’s estimate was that there were 1.36 million expat Malayalis even way back in 1998. This could also mean all projections of revenues that the NRIs supposedly send back home too is flawed.
If these reports were indeed the base of our policy making, haven’t the Kerala government gone terribly wrong – right from the 1990s when it comes to NRI welfare initiatives.
But even more alarmingly, where did the 2 million plus Malayalis who were supposed to be living outside disappear?
Is this once again a classic case of lies, damned lies and statistics?
And how can the Kerala government now decide to rely on this report for all future projections? Someone has to step forward with an explanation, for sure, or the true victims will be the real number of Malayalis, who would someday be forced to return to their states, and find that they belong nowhere.
Neither in census statistics… nor in the hearts.
ENDS
