At least 6,500 visitor workers from India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka have died in Qatar in the past ten years since the Gulf state won the right to host the 2022 FIFA World Cup.
a guardian This means that an average of 12 people lost their lives per week.
But what is Qatar’s relationship to the death of South Asian workers? In December 2010, Doha won the right to host an international sporting event under controversial circumstances and immediately began the business of being a worthy host for the World Cup. Huge construction projects have been launched: in addition to seven new stadiums, new hotels and a new airport, new roads have been constructed and a new public transport system developed.
A new city was built for the World Cup Final.
Gulf states prefer to employ foreign workers on construction sites, and Qatar is no exception, with South Asian workers arriving in large numbers due to World Cup projects. According to the British newspaper, although the death reports do not indicate the deceased’s profession or occupation,
Most of them most likely worked on construction sites and lost their lives in accidents or poor working conditions.
However, in most cases, natural death is cited as the cause of death.
According to Guardian’s information, 69 percent of workers in India, Nepal and Bangladesh have been diagnosed with a natural death by the Qatari authorities, which may be due to the Qatari authorities not making an effort to determine the exact cause.
It is not assumed that the persons concerned operate under conditions which it would be best not to disclose.
The Guardian reported in 2019 that the intense summer heat had caused the sudden deaths of many guest workers, but since the Cathars do not perform autopsies in such cases either, the natural death has yet to be determined. This is also found in 80 percent of guest Indian workers who have died in the past 10 years.
Qatari authorities responded to the Guardian’s concerns in a statement. According to the statement, the number of deaths is proportional to the number of foreigners working in the country, and the data also includes white-collar employees. He added that everyone, including foreigners, had access to free health care and that the death rate of migrant workers was already declining due to health and safety reforms introduced in the labor system.
In any case, the British newspaper complains about the lack of transparency of the country record of deaths, as well as the lack of a unified system for this in the government, and the different bodies have different data. With this, The Guardian notes that Doha is permitting guest workers to be placed under the rug.
The organizing committee for the Qatar World Cup pledged to investigate all deaths, and has always worked with transparency, which is why it questions allegations about the number of deaths in construction projects. FIFA also talked about this issue, stressing that the number of accidents on construction sites linked to the World Cup is less than the number of accidents that occur in other regions of the world.
