India's foreign minister said the government is providing food aid to thousands of Indian workers in Saudi Arabia who are not able to buy food after losing their jobs in the kingdom.

Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj said in a series of tweets over the weekend that the Indian Embassy in Riyadh would ensure that no laid-off worker went without food. A junior government minister will also travel to Saudi Arabia to begin the process of flying home the workers who don't have the money to pay for airfare.

India's consulate in the city of Jeddah said its officials worked overnight to distribute food to the laid-off Indians who live in five worker complexes or camps in and around the city. More than 16,000 kilograms of food and other items including eggs, spices and salt were distributed.

The workers are mostly employed by Saudi construction companies. The industry has slowed down because of low global prices. Swaraj said India has more than 10,000 such workers in Saudi Arabia.

Indian news reports say that many of the workers have not been paid for months.

The Indian Consulate in the Saudi city of Jeddah posted photos of workers lining up for free food packets.

Swaraj said that while there were also reports of Indian workers in Kuwait losing their jobs, the situation in Saudi Arabia was worse. "While situation in Kuwait is manageable, matters are much worse in Saudi Arabia," she said in a tweet.

She asked junior foreign ministers VK Singh and MJ Akbar to travel to the region to take up the matter with local authorities.

She also appealed to the roughly 3 million Indians in the nation to help their "fellow brothers and sisters."

Hundreds of thousands of Indian workers travel to the Middle East each year for better-paying jobs than back home, working as laborers, electricians and drivers. They endure substandard living and working conditions in order to send money back to their impoverished families in India. Officials told the Times of India newspaper that the government was also planning to bring back the out-of-work Indians in the coming weeks.

Domestic media outlets who interviewed community workers in Saudi Arabia, said most of the workers had been laid off by Saudi Oger, a leading Saudi construction company. The firm had not paid salaries for the last seven months, and had also stopped providing food to the workers.

One of the community workers told the IANS news agency that there had been a slowdown in the Saudi construction industry because of the fall in global crude oil prices. "Not only Saudi Arabia, it has been happening in all Gulf countries," he said.

Saudi Arabia, like other oil-rich Gulf countries, depends heavily on Asian migrant workers.

Indians form the bulk of the Asian workers in the region. Some 70 per cent of the 3 million expatriate Indians in Saudi Arabia and 800,000 of them in Kuwait are blue-collar workers, mainly employed in the construction, oil and infrastructure sector.

In reports over past years, right groups like Amnesty International have said that workers in the countries frequently suffer difficulties including non-payment of wages, harsh and dangerous working conditions and appalling standards of accommodation.