As rain lashed Chennai, Kasthuri Munirathinam received a call that the government hospital ambulance that was to fetch her for her next check-up could not drive through the floods in her neighbourhood. Kasthuri lay down on the bed in her sister’s house. She had had knee and spine surgery and her amputated right arm throbbed. "This missing arm is a lifetime’s reminder of the three months I spent in Riyadh," she says.In those harrowing months, when she worked as a domestic help for a 70-year-old woman, Kasthuri says she was fed one roti a day, worked more than 15 hours, never allowed to speak to her family on the phone, and paid a month’s wages only for it to be taken right back. When she complained to the employer about harassment, they had a fight. Kasthuri, 55, says the "Ma’am" made a throat-slitting action and locked all the doors, which scared her. She threw a sari out of a second floor window and tried to climb out. "I heard a chak! noise, my arm was cut and I fell and lost consciousness," she says. When she came to at a hospital, she found her right arm was amputated, her knee and back broken and in need of extensive surgery. As her sister and son in India drew the Indian Embassy’s attention to Kasthuri’s condition, the ministry of overseas Indian affairs and the Tamil Nadu government worked to bring her back home.Authorities in Saudi Arabia have denied allegations about the arm cutting, saying Kasthuri lost her arm in the fall. But no less significant is the exploitative work environment which led her to try to escape. There are more than 5 million low-paid migrant workers in the Gulf countries, an estimated 1.2 million in Saudi Arabia alone, in construction, hotels, cleaning, and largely women in domestic work. Indians form the single largest migrant workforce in Gulf countries.While not every situation is as extreme, the daily ill treatment, non-payment of wages, food deprivation, physical and verbal abuse, and confiscation of passport are shockingly common. "There are good and bad employers, but abuse is quite endemic in the Middle East," says Rothna Begum, Human Rights Watch’s women’s rights researcher who has interviewed scores of women working in the Gulf states. "The weak labour laws and systems are the ones that give the employers inordinate power, control and impunity, creating the conditions for exploitation." In 2014, the Indian government signed two bilateral agreements with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to improve the conditions of migrant workers, and the latter more recently increased penalties for rights violations, but these still leave domestic work, which thousands of Indian women do in private homes in isolation, out of its purview.Those migrating for work in the six Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Bahrain, are employed under a restrictive visa-sponsorship system, known as kafala. Under this, the migrant workers are tied to a single employer for the duration of their contract and cannot change jobs without their employer’s consent. This is different from work visas in other countries because in the Gulf states, a worker who wants to leave the job or country has to get an exit permit from the employer. Some migrants have to pay their employer five times their wages to let them go. On the other hand, Begum says workers’ complaints of harassment or underpayment are not taken seriously, and employers are rarely convicted. Those who leave their employers are considered runaways and can be arrested and deported.Kasthuri went to work abroad because she was the sole breadwinner for her disabled son, five grandchildren and two daughters, and did not find a well-paying job in her home town. Men and women queuing up in recruiting agencies across the country have similar financial reasons to go to the Gulf. Every day, about 1,000 low-wage (upwards of Rs 11 , 000 a month) migrant workers are cleared to travel to Saudi Arabia, which has received more Indians in the past 25 years than any other Gulf country. Chennai’s Protector of Emigrants (POE) Ajith Kumar says his office clears an average of 100 emigration applications a day. Indian workers in the Middle East send close to Rs 50,000 crore every year by way of remittances, which provide for family back home, and bolster the local economy. Remittances constitute a third of Kerala’s net domestic product. Yet, the process of emigration is inadequately regulated with the focus being on travel but rarely on welfare. "It’s impossible to check if the employer is genuine in every case; we can only operate through the licensed recruiting agents," admits POE Kumar.Migration to the Gulf is a veritable industry today, with legal and illegal recruiting agents and brokers interacting with millions of people in Kerala and Tamil Nadu – the largest sending states – desperate to find employment abroad. Lakhs of rupees ( Rs 3-10 lakh) are exchanged by way of "transaction fees" and complex arrangements are entered into but rarely with contracts or documentation. Job contracts, employer verifications, and salary and rights guarantees are given little importance.Grace Vanitha, 37, from Velankani, for instance, went to Riyadh to be a home nurse for an ailing elder, but was forced to cook and do domestic work for a joint family of 21. She had not paid the visa broker, so the employer held her passport, and she had to work without the promised Rs 22,000 monthly salary for six months to "pay off dues". Grace did not complain at first. "The family was good to me, and I began to learn Arabic to communicate better," she says. "But working 20 hours a day, I started to get exhausted." When she finally asked about her wages, the family was upset. "They said I was ungrateful. They did not let me leave the house or speak to my family."It was when Grace wanted to quit that she heard of the exit permit requirement for the first time. "She didn’t know the procedure, the Indian authorities did not verify the job, and her illegal visa broker is working, deceiving more poor women," says a member of a workers’ rights NGO in Riyadh who helped retrieve Grace’s passport, paid the family for her exit permit and brought her back home. "I have not seen a single case in my tenure in Chennai where an illegal recruiting agent has been convicted," says former Chennai POE Jai Sankar.The Indian law governing work migration is the Emigration Act 1983 and the POE is the authority who gives the clearances to travel. When a worker suffers abuse, the government has often stepped in for repatriation, but India has a long way to go in fixing the system that facilitates such abuse.India has a worse record than Sri Lanka or the Philippines in pushing for better wages and living conditions for its citizens. Workers from the Philippines, for example, were long held as cheap labour until the country raised the minimum wage demand to around $400. "It has considerably changed how Filipino women workers were treated," says Begum. Countries sometimes ban migration of their citizens to a Gulf state, Indonesia being the latest in May 2015, citing that the abuses were "harming the dignity of Indonesia".On the other hand, in December 2003, India modified its Emigration Act procedures for Saudi migration, removing the need for employer letters, and a contract. In an order, the ministry of overseas Indian affairs (then under the ministry of labour) said if these documents were insisted upon, "the employment opportunity for Indian personnel in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia maybe adversely affected". In other words, the ministry fears insisting on rights could affect remittances.Competition for jobs among countries, and the resultant lack of bargaining power with the Gulf states, means that India exerts little pressure for better labour protections. Begum calls it a race to the bottom, where even when one country takes a stand (like Indonesia and Sri Lanka did), and sends fewer citizens until the Gulf institutes better labour laws, other countries like Bangladesh, Nepal, and even India rush to fill the gap. India has signed agreements with Saudi Arabia to improve workers’ access to justice, to healthcare, and reduce the cost of migration, but the larger issues still remain. "This means less criticism of the kafala, and only a show of condemning abuse like in Kasthuri’s case ," says a protector of emigrants on the condition of anonymity.Such widespread exploitation is often blamed on racism or classism on the part of the employers in the Gulf, but those who work with migrants maintain that it is the lack of strong labour laws that encourages impunity. S Irudaya Rajan, a professor at the Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram, says India does not have an articulated policy on orderly and safe migration. "Unlike the Philippines, we have no organised system that looks at the migrant life cycle — education pre-departure, protection during work abroad, and rehabilitation on return," he says.Weak labour policies create a perception that the labourers themselves are not of value. "Sending people as ‘cheap labour’ increases their vulnerability," says Human Rights Watch’s Begum. So asking Saudi Arabia to enforce penalties for non-payment and to fix a minimum wage at a reasonably high level can not only increase remittances, but also remove the cheap labour tag that encourages exploitation. In Saudi Arabia, the Indian embassy raised the recommended minimum salary on its website from 670 to 1,200 riyals last year, and in the UAE, from 1,200 to 1,500 dirhams. Potentially, this could raise wages for all sending countries. However, it has not been strictly enforced, especially with Saudi companies threatening to shift hiring to Bangladesh and Pakistan. Sending countries are in competition, but it is mutually beneficial for all to prevail upon Gulf states to also abolish the exit permit system, ensure that workers can work freely for another employer, have rights equal to more well-paid migrants, and have violations investigated. Simultaneously, prospective migrants must be taught about their rights and limitations. "We should understand that Gulf states really depend on migrant workers. That’s as much an opportunity as a bargaining chip," says Begum.In her sister’s house, as Kasthuri struggles to sit up on her own, she says, "I’ve learnt the hard way, but I am hoping my horrible chapter is a lesson to someone somewhere."