Insomnia stalks kingdom of dreams

If Abu Dhabi and the West do not refuel Dubai, the big casualty would be millions of workers from South Asia who see this desert city state as a profitable getaway
PN Gupta Dubai

FOR many years now, the shortcut to a good and prosperous life in South Asia has usually been a ticket out of the country. Millions took small boats, ships and aircrafts to escape joblessness and extreme poverty to migrate wherever there was money and hope of a better life, even a marginally better life. And Dubai, furiously rising above the sand dunes to vie with other financial and trading centres like Hong Kong, Singapore and even London, promised long term hope of good money and good life till the contagion of the global economic recession bludgeoned its economic fundamentals.

And now Dubai, staring at loan defaults, is on its knees.

How did it happen?

There are easy answers available in the angry reporting flowing out from the Gulf despatched by nervous English expatriates for whom the collapse of this desert kingdom also means an end to a paradise which had year-long sun, sand, private beaches and unlimited easy money. They blame the profligacy of the Al Nahayan family that rules Dubai and the manner in which it went about building the tallest, biggest and most expensive structures in this Neverland that had no resources of its own, like its more affluent neighbour, Abu Dhabi.

Indeed, low or no tax rates for rich investors, special economic zones and other high profile devices resulted in global capital flowing into this kingdom. The city was over-leveraged. Hence, if there was any consequent interruption in the flow of capital, it was bound to get hurt.

Mega projects like Burj Dubai, one of the tallest buildings in the world, or the palm-shaped, swanky manmade islands that were sold to celebrities all over the world, not only underlined the bizarre forms hedonism and human greed could take, but also the recklessness that comes to those who are not challenged by human or natural laws. The Dubai ruler, as some writings in the media suggest, was an epitome of such a mindset. Is it really the only truth or is there more to it?

Dubai has more expatriates than local inhabitants. And, a majority of them were labourers who had left their abode to work in inhospitable conditions to send money back to their families. The riches of Dubai were an outcome of the sweat and tears of those who worked in extreme desert temperatures, often in terrible work conditions, ghettoised and with few fundamental rights. Their labour and the remittances that they sent back home impacted the economies of their countries. India was a major beneficiary of all the hard-earned money that came their way.

The economies of Kerala and Punjab, for instance, were sustained by these remittances. "If I had five sons, then I would have been the richest man in my village since all of them would have sent money from the Gulf. I have just one son, whose money orders cannot match my neighbour's prosperity who has four sons working in the Gulf." This is the typical refrain of a father in the backwaters of a Kerala village at Champakulam near Alleppey. And, his feelings are neither symbolic nor solitary. They denote a universal truth of expectation.

Until the time IT professionals began to travel to the West and send their sizeable earnings back home, it was the poor villagers who worked as casual labourers at the innumerable construction sites of Dubai and other Gulf settlements that brought majority of remittances back home. Till the late 1990s, the Gulf sent back the maximum money home. The rapid urbanisation, development and new-found wealth of Kerala can be clearly credited to the Gulf money. Besides, Kerala faces intense labour shortage - even in the empty and shrinking rice fields, where Tamil labourers are filling the void.