KATHMANDU: At least 1400 Nepalis have been killed while helping to build football stadiums for the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar. WDR’s investigative documentary, titled “Trapped in Qatar,” on Friday exposed the number of Nepali migrants died in Qatar. Similarly, documentary has also revealed the harrowing plight of workers forced to live in crowded camps without many basic human needs.
Construction site accidents and squalid living conditions in the Gulf state are claiming around 110 lives every year, according to Nepali government figures, Arab News reported.
And bereaved families of dead workers told German broadcaster WDR that they had received no compensation from Doha for their tragic losses.
One Nepali stadia construction worker, Dil Prasad, said: “We are captured, and every day we nourish ourselves on water and bread. Without money we can’t do anything else. Month on month our situation gets worse. I’m not sure how much longer I can do it. I just want to go home. We can’t even call our families in Nepal.”
Kishore Tamang from the Bara district of Nepal, around 250 km south of the capital Katmandu, went to Qatar in 2015 hoping to earn enough money to pay off family debts. But within a year he was dead, after being killed in a fall from a wall at a new football stadium being built for the World Cup. No compensation was paid to his family.
It was a similar story for the family of Jagat Nepali from the Nuwakot district. Within six months of arriving in Qatar he suffered a cardiac arrest brought on, his relatives said, by the intolerable heat and poor living conditions in the migrant workers’ camp.
A government official from Nepal’s Department of Immigration, told Arab News: “We are aware of the situation in Qatar and the difficulties Nepali workers face there. We try to discourage people from going to such places.”
Comment