It began with a steady flow of coffins through the arrivals hall at Kathmandu airport. In departures, hundreds of thousands of young men were leaving their lives in Nepal to provide for their families as the human capital fuelling a multibillion-dollar construction boom in the neighbouring Gulf states. In arrivals, on a daily basis, some of their predecessors were being unloaded from the cargo hold in coffins.

This telltale sign that something was going very badly wrong for migrant workers led Guardian reporters on a months-long investigation that produced some chastening revelations for Qatar: workers, having paid fees to often unscrupulous middlemen, were facing horrendous conditions upon arrival in the emirate to work. Wages were often lower than billed, living quarters were often inhuman, working conditions were demanding at best, and outrageous, dangerous – and even fatal – at worst.

Many of the problems led back to the kafala system that ties migrant workers to their employers. Unable to leave the country without the permission of their sponsor, workers were often forced to accept lower wages and unsanitary, cramped and dangerous living conditions. Wages could be withheld for months. Case after case has been painstakingly documented by human rights organisations and the media.

Those more unlucky still ended up seriously injured and trapped in limbo in Qatar’s hospitals, abandoned by their employers, with passports and exit visas withheld, and with no insurance to pay for treatment. For others, their journey ended in a coffin being received by their shattered families in the arrivals hall.

Those from Nepal make up only one sixth of the migrant workers in Qatar alone. The numbers are mind-boggling: there are 1.4 million migrant workers in Qatar, making up around 94% of the overall population. The remaining 6% enjoy the highest GDP per capita of any country in the world. Yet it is the individual stories of human suffering that have brought the issue home and led a series of inspectors, from the International Labour Organisation to the United Nations, to demand change.

While respected human rights groups and trade unions had loudly raised the issue since Qatar was controversially awarded the World Cup in December 2010, there was little movement until the Guardian published the results of its investigation in September 2013.



Central to the investigation was the revelation that hundreds of migrant workers are dying in Qatar each year. The Guardian produced documentation detailing the deaths of Nepalese workers. The Qatari response was at turns conciliatory and defiant. A global outcry ensued.

Since then, human rights groups have urged the Qatari government to make a simple, clear statement of intent by abolishing the controversial exit visa system that gives employers ultimate power over their workers and prevents workers from leaving the country without consent.



Yet even more liberal forces within Qatar urge caution, fearing a backlash if conservative countrymen believe they are being bounced into action by the west. Frustration has grown as existing laws have not been implemented and discussion of new ones has been caught up in red tape.



Those governments sending hundreds of thousands of workers to Qatar, and even the NGOs in Nepal and elsewhere campaigning for change, are also conflicted – given the employment opportunities on offer for their people.



The other players notable for their silence have been the huge multinational construction firms that are profiting from Qatar’s construction boom.



Earlier this week, the French medal of honour was conferred on a senior Qatari official, Abdullah bin Hamad Al Attiyah, by the president, François Hollande. Qatar has spent €15bn with French companies in the past five years alone.



The French former president Nicolas Sarkozy urged the Uefa president, Michel Platini, to vote for Qatar to host the World Cup, which he duly did. Platini’s son is employed by a sportswear firm owned by a Qatar investment fund, although the Frenchman insists his decision to give the country his vote was his alone.



In Germany, Siemens has the $8.2bn contract to build the ambitious new metro system and many other firms have benefited. In Britain, a large number of construction firms and consultants have been engaged in a dash for contracts.



But insiders who attend a Department for Business, Innovation and Skills working group for those with interests in the region say the mistreatment of migrant workers is barely mentioned.



Since the scale of the problems faced by migrant workers became clear, the Foreign Office minister Hugh Robertson, the mayor of London, Boris Johnson, and the Prince of Wales have all travelled to the region and been received in Doha. And yet the focus has been very much on trade links rather than human rights.



On a wall in the towering office block where the Qatar 2022 supreme committee is based, an entire wall is given over to a series of drawings and plans representing the overall “masterplan”, from investment in transport infrastructure to the stadiums that must be constructed from scratch.



Drive through the often gridlocked traffic 10 miles out of Doha, past the virgin desert where the as-yet-unbuilt Lusail Iconic stadium is set to host the World Cup final in 2022, and you can see a scale model of an entire city that doesn’t exist yet.



An artist's impression of the proposed Lusail stadium in Doha, which is intended to be the centrepiece of Qatar's World Cup in 2022. Photograph: PR

The planned $45bn city of Lusail, like many of the other infrastructure projects on which Qatar will spend £123bn over the next four years alone, is not happening solely because of the World Cup but is intrinsically related to it.

The bold and controversial World Cup bid is an integral part of the wider 2030 Vision, a project designed to position Qatar for the future and the day when the natural oil and gas reserves that are the source of its mind-boggling wealth might run dry.



For its part, Fifa has twisted in the wind. World football’s governing body, discredited by a string of corruption claims, first promised in 2011 to use the spotlight afforded by the World Cup to hold Qatar to promises of reform on the way migrant workers are treated.



Following disturbing reports from human rights organisations such as Amnesty and Human Rights Watch, as well as the strident campaigning of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), Fifa’s secretary general, Jérôme Valcke, promised to hold Qatar to account.

“As the world governing body of the most popular sport we have a responsibility that goes beyond the development of football and the organisation of our competitions,” he said then.

But little was done and the Fifa president, Sepp Blatter, was only forced to confront the issue again after the outcry that followed the Guardian’s reports. In typical fashion, Blatter has told each audience what they want to hear – he has travelled to the Gulf to reassure and offer warm words, while employing the Fifa executive committee member Theo Zwanziger to talk tough and engage with the ITUC.

Fifa has insisted in statement after statement that the situation for migrant workers on the ground must improve. In a recent letter to the shadow international development secretary, Jim Murphy, Valcke again promised it was “committed to assuming its role and responsibility … so that the situation of migrant workers in Qatar and their labour rights is addressed with the necessary urgency considering the seriousness of the matter”.

But in his most recent comments Blatter appeared to wash his hands of the issue. “They have a problem and we know that, but this is not a question for Fifa," he said in Hong Kong last week. “It is one which the state of Qatar must handle, as well as all the construction companies who are responsible for the workers.”

Even now, too little is known about the fate of many of those who travel to Qatar and other Gulf states, already tied to their sponsoring employer by kafala, in debt to middlemen and unaware of the dire conditions in which they may be forced to work.

Thanks to investigative work by the media and human rights organisations, and disclosures from the Pravasi Nepali Coordination Committee (an NGO in Nepal) and the Indian embassy, we know now that more than 500 Indian migrant workers have died since January 2012 and more than 380 Nepalese workers died in 2012 and 2013.

There are an estimated 1.4 million migrant workers in Qatar. Those from India make up 22% of the total, with a similar proportion from Pakistan. About 16% are from Nepal, 13% from Iran, 11% from the Philippines, 8% from Egypt and 8% from Sri Lanka.

Not only do we not know how many migrant workers have died from those other countries, too little is known about how those from Nepal and India were killed. Latest figures obtained by the Guardian show that another 53 Nepalese people have died in Qatar this year, despite the call for action.



A report from Nepal's Foreign Employment Promotion Board shows the countries where Nepalese people working abroad have died between January and April 2014, including 53 in Qatar. Photograph: theguardian.com Photograph: theguardian.com

Detailed cause-of-death information seen by the Guardian shows that many of the Nepalese workers were killed by sudden heart attacks or in road accidents, as well as workplace accidents. Yet campaigners are convinced that many of those deaths recorded as sudden heart failure are caused by overwork, and some of those road accidents are a result of a failure of health and safety practices.

The impediments to change are both practical and philosophical. Human rights organisations who visit Doha regularly are cautiously optimistic about the extent to which senior figures in the Qatari administration are engaging with the issue. A DLA Piper report that looked like being an attempt to knock down the claims from the media and human rights groups seems to have become a serious attempt to grapple with the issue.

And whereas the previous response was to attack the messenger – the attorney general rounded on the Guardian after those initial reports – there now appears a genuine will to at least consider the problem. The World Cup supreme committee has led the way, introducing a new code of practice for the small number of workers employed directly on building the World Cup stadiums and pointed to increased inspections.

There have also been longstanding promises to reform the law regarding domestic workers, who are not covered by the existing legislation and can be subject to horrific exploitation and mistreatment, and there are some signs of progress. The publication of the DLA Piper report is expected to be accompanied by what have been described as “significant” changes to labour law. There is talk of expanding the workers’ charter that governs World Cup projects to all of those commissioned by the Qatar Foundation, which oversees billions of dollars of investment every year.

The report this month from the UN that called for an end to kafala also expressed hope that the World Cup, and the global attention to the issue it has brought, could be a catalyst for change.

But those campaigning for change on the ground are conflicted. Twelve months ago, they would have been pleased at this level of engagement at senior levels in Qatar. But given the global outcry that followed the initial reports, there will be bitter disappointment if they fail to secure meaningful reform. Meanwhile the position of the emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, and those around him in his “star chamber” remains opaque.

The fear is that any proposed changes, watered down so as not to offend the more conservative forces in the country, will not prove sufficient to help those most in danger. Even then, there remains concern about how strictly changes will be enforced amid the dash to complete the unprecedented “nation building” programme given the fixed deadline of the 2022 World Cup.

Without fundamental reform of kafala, harsher penalties for those who transgress, the scrapping of the exit visa system, new rules to regulate recruitment agencies, much improved enforcement and a change in the culture of the companies employed to build a country’s infrastructure from scratch in record time, the situation is unlikely to improve any time soon.

Recent harrowing reports from the German national newspaper Die Welt and others show that the suffering continues on the ground. Meanwhile, the repatriation of bodies continues, with more than 60 workers from India and Nepal alone killed in Qatar in February and March this year.