Million `Gulf Wives blood money` |
A million married women left to look after families, about 2 million children growing up with perhaps just 1 parent around, and about the same number of aged parents struggling alone, far from their children abroad: this snapshot of emigration from Tamil Nadu sums up the social cost of getting an annual remittance of Rs 61,843 crore into the state. It is a large sum — 14% of Tamil Nadu`s state domestic product, 6.8 times the money it received from the Centre as revenue transfer in 2014-15, and 1.8 times the entire expenditure of the state government — earned in exchange for a heavy price.According to the Tamil Nadu Migration Survey 2015, the first comprehensive study on emigration from the state, carried out by the Centre for Development Studies (CDS) in Thiruvananthapuram, roughly every tenth household in Tamil Nadu has one or more workers abroad. Of the more than 2.2 million emigrants from the state, almost 75% are Hindu, 15% Muslim, and 10% Christian. Roughly 15% of emigrants are women.
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