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With inputs from agencies

NEW DELHI: After thousands of Indian workers in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, lost their jobs and were forced to starve, the city's Indian Consulate and members of the Indian community in the country rallied together to distribute nearly 16,000 kilograms of food to them. The show of solidarity came after External Affairs minister Sushma Swaraj had called on her Twitter followers in Saudi Arabia to help their "brothers and sisters", and said there was nothing mightier than "the collective will of (the) Indian nation."According to an Economic Times report, Indian expatriates constitute the largest migrant workforce in the Gulf nations, which include Saudi Arabia and Kuwait - another country in which Indian workers faced a similar plight at the weekend. Reports on Indian migrant workers struggling to live and work with dignity in the region aren't rare. Workers have complained about ill-treatment by employers, and about being detained even after their work documents expire. Moreover, agents have been known to hoodwink Indians with false promises and traffic them to the Gulf without adequate documentation, the National Domestic Workers' Movement told Reuters in July.Reuters reported last Wednesday that 15 workers from Tamil Nadu had appealed for help from the the Indian government - both in a video and in writing. They said the last time they'd been paid was in November last year, and that they'd been forced to work without remuneration after their work documents expired, and were left unrenewed by their employers. In addition, each of them had paid an agent Rs. 2 lakh to get a job abroad, they said.The poor working conditions that immigrant workers in the Gulf have to contend with can be partly explained by the existence of the 'kafala' system. Under this system - which is in use in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain Oman and the United Arab Emirates - migrant worker's visas "are tied to their employers so they cannot change jobs without their employer’s consent," Human Rights Watch (HRW) says . An worker who chooses to flee from an abusive employer can be fined, deported, or even imprisoned, HRW adds.Work conditions can be extraordinarily oppressive: domestic workers have told HRW that they were severely overworked, underpaid, saw their payments withheld while they were obliged to keep working, or were simply refused payment. The story of Kasthuri Munirathinam - a maid from Tamil Nadu - is a case in point. In November last year, the Economic Times reported that Kasthuri's employer had cut off her right hand after she tried to escape from the house in Riyadh - the Saudi capital - where she worked 15 hours a day. She was forced to survive on a single roti a day, hadn't been allowed to phone her family in India, and when she received a month's wages, they were soon taken back from her.Kasthuri returned to India after three months in the Gulf, but the same can't yet be said of the thousands of workers stranded in Kuwait and Saudi after being laid off. External Affairs minister Swaraj has sent ministers of state V K Singh and M J Akbar to Saudi Arabia and Kuwait - where she said the situation was "manageable" - to negotiate on their behalf.