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Rights and freedomWorkers' rights



This article is more than 1 year old


REVEALED: 6,500 MIGRANT WORKERS HAVE DIED IN QATAR SINCE WORLD CUP AWARDED

This article is more than 1 year old

Guardian analysis indicates shocking figure over the past decade likely to be an
underestimate

 * What we know about the human cost of the 2022 World Cup

Latha Bollapally, with her son Rajesh Goud, holds a picture of her husband,
Madhu Bollapally, 43, a migrant worker who died in Qatar. Photograph: Kailash
Nirmal
Latha Bollapally, with her son Rajesh Goud, holds a picture of her husband,
Madhu Bollapally, 43, a migrant worker who died in Qatar. Photograph: Kailash
Nirmal

Supported by

About this content
Pete Pattisson, Niamh McIntyre, Imran Mukhtar in Islamabad, Nikhil Eapen in
Bangalore, Imran Mukhtar in Islamabad, Md Owasim Uddin Bhuyan in Dhaka, Udwab
Bhattarai in Kathmandu and Aanya Piyari in Colombo
Tue 23 Feb 2021 06.00 GMTLast modified on Tue 13 Dec 2022 11.28 GMT
 * 
 * 
 * 



More than 6,500 migrant workers from India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri
Lanka have died in Qatar since it won the right to host the World Cup 10 years
ago, the Guardian can reveal.

The findings, compiled from government sources, mean an average of 12 migrant
workers from these five south Asian nations have died each week since the night
in December 2010 when the streets of Doha were filled with ecstatic crowds
celebrating Qatar’s victory.



Data from India, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka revealed there were 5,927
deaths of migrant workers in the period 2011–2020. Separately, data from
Pakistan’s embassy in Qatar reported a further 824 deaths of Pakistani workers,
between 2010 and 2020.


Mohammad Shahid Miah, 29, from Bangladesh, died when floodwater in his room came
into contact with an exposed electric cable, electrocuting him.

The total death toll is significantly higher, as these figures do not include
deaths from a number of countries which send large numbers of workers to Qatar,
including the Philippines and Kenya. Deaths that occurred in the final months of
2020 are also not included.

In the past 10 years, Qatar has embarked on an unprecedented building programme,
largely in preparation for the football tournament in 2022. In addition to seven
new stadiums, dozens of major projects have been completed or are under way,
including a new airport, roads, public transport systems, hotels and a new city,
which will host the World Cup final.

While death records are not categorised by occupation or place of work, it is
likely many workers who have died were employed on these World Cup
infrastructure projects, says Nick McGeehan, a director at FairSquare Projects,
an advocacy group specialising in labour rights in the Gulf. “A very significant
proportion of the migrant workers who have died since 2011 were only in the
country because Qatar won the right to host the World Cup,” he said.

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There have been 37 deaths among workers directly linked to construction of World
Cup stadiums, of which 34 are classified as “non-work related” by the event’s
organising committee. Experts have questioned the use of the term because in
some cases it has been used to describe deaths which have occurred on the job,
including a number of workers who have collapsed and died on stadium
construction sites.

The findings expose Qatar’s failure to protect its 2 million-strong migrant
workforce, or even investigate the causes of the apparently high rate of death
among the largely young workers.

Behind the statistics lie countless stories of devastated families who have been
left without their main breadwinner, struggling to gain compensation and
confused about the circumstances of their loved one’s death.

Ghal Singh Rai from Nepal paid nearly £1,000 in recruitment fees for his job as
a cleaner in a camp for workers building the Education City World Cup stadium.
Within a week of arriving, he killed himself.

Another worker, Mohammad Shahid Miah, from Bangladesh, was electrocuted in his
worker accommodation after water came into contact with exposed electricity
cables.

In India, the family of Madhu Bollapally have never understood how the healthy
43-year old died of “natural causes” while working in Qatar. His body was found
lying on his dorm room floor.

Qatar’s grim death toll is revealed in long spreadsheets of official data
listing the causes of death: multiple blunt injuries due to a fall from height;
asphyxia due to hanging; undetermined cause of death due to decomposition.



But among the causes, the most common by far is so-called “natural deaths”,
often attributed to acute heart or respiratory failure.



Based on the data obtained by the Guardian, 69% of deaths among Indian, Nepali
and Bangladeshi workers are categorised as natural. Among Indians alone, the
figure is 80%.

The Guardian has previously reported that such classifications, which are
usually made without an autopsy, often fail to provide a legitimate medical
explanation for the underlying cause of these deaths.

In 2019 it found that Qatar’s intense summer heat is likely to be a significant
factor in many worker deaths. The Guardian’s findings were supported by research
commissioned by the UN’s International Labour Organization which revealed that
for at least four months of the year workers faced significant heat stress when
working outside.


Labourers from Nepal put up scaffolding for the launch of the World Cup logo.
They start work long before sunrise to avoid the heat. Photograph: Pete
Pattisson

A report from Qatar government’s own lawyers in 2014 recommended that it
commission a study into the deaths of migrant workers from cardiac arrest, and
amend the law to “allow for autopsies … in all cases of unexpected or sudden
death”. The government has done neither.

Qatar continues to “drag its feet on this critical and urgent issue in apparent
disregard for workers’ lives”, said Hiba Zayadin, Gulf researcher for Human
Rights Watch. “We have called on Qatar to amend its law on autopsies to require
forensic investigations into all sudden or unexplained deaths, and pass
legislation to require that all death certificates include reference to a
medically meaningful cause of death,” she said.

The Qatar government says that the number of deaths – which it does not dispute
– is proportionate to the size of the migrant workforce and that the figures
include white-collar workers who have died naturally after living in Qatar for
many years. It also says that only 20 per cent of expatriates from the countries
in question are employed in construction, and that work-related deaths in this
sector accounted for fewer than 10 percent of fatalities within this group.



“The mortality rate among these communities is within the expected range for the
size and demographics of the population. However, every lost life is a tragedy,
and no effort is spared in trying to prevent every death in our country,” the
Qatari government said in a statement by a spokesperson.

The official added that all citizens and foreign nationals have access to free
first-class healthcare, and that there has been a steady decline in the
mortality rate among “guest workers” over the past decade due to health and
safety reforms to the labour system.

Other significant causes of deaths among Indians, Nepalis and Bangladeshis are
road accidents (12%), workplace accidents (7%) and suicide (7%).

Covid-related deaths, which have remained extremely low in Qatar, have not
significantly affected the figures, with just over 250 fatalities among all
nationalities.

The Guardian’s research has also highlighted the lack of transparency, rigour
and detail in recording deaths in Qatar. Embassies in Doha and governments in
labour-sending countries are reluctant to share the data, possibly for political
reasons. Where statistics have been provided, there are inconsistencies between
the figures held by different government agencies, and there is no standard
format for recording the causes of death. One south-Asian embassy said they
could not share data on the causes of death because they were only recorded by
hand in a notebook.



“There is a real lack of clarity and transparency surrounding these deaths,”
said May Romanos, Gulf researcher for Amnesty International. “There is a need
for Qatar to strengthen its occupational health and safety standards.”

The committee organising the World Cup in Qatar, when asked about the deaths on
stadium projects, said: “We deeply regret all of these tragedies and
investigated each incident to ensure lessons were learned. We have always
maintained transparency around this issue and dispute inaccurate claims around
the number of workers who have died on our projects.”

In a statement, a spokesperson for Fifa, football’s world governing body, said
it is fully committed to protecting the rights of workers on Fifa projects.
“With the very stringent health and safety measures on site … the frequency of
accidents on Fifa World Cup construction sites has been low when compared to
other major construction projects around the world,” they said, without
providing evidence.

The heading and sub-heading on this article were amended on 2 March 2021 to
clarify that the figure for 6,500 deaths covers the 10-year period since Qatar
was awarded the World Cup. The article text was amended on 8 and 18 March 2021
to include further comments from the Qatar government relating to the percentage
of expatriates employed in construction and work-related deaths in this sector.






Topics
 * Workers' rights
 * Rights and freedom

 * Qatar
 * World Cup 2022
 * Middle East and north Africa
 * India
 * Bangladesh
 * Nepal
 * news

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