The move came after Renuka Chowdhury, the minister for women and children, said
that overseas domestic workers had complained of being pushed into prostitution
after their employers had seized their passports.
A ban will be "imposed on granting emigration clearance to women below 30 if
they are seeking employment as housemaids," Chowdhury, who recently returned
from Kuwait, was quoted by the Times of India as telling parliament.
An exception will be made for women who return to India on leave from their
jobs and who wish to return to their employers, the ministry for Indians
working abroad said.
Some 17 countries will be covered by the ban, which was aimed at halting the
trafficking of women for prostitution, the newspaper reported.
Chowdhury said that she was considering a move to require overseas domestic
workers to deposit their passports with the local Indian embassy or consulate,
aping a model used by Singapore for its citizens, according to the report.
Millions of Indians work overseas, particularly in the six oil-rich Gulf Arab
countries of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab
Emirates.
As many as 6 million Indian expatriates send home $20 billion a year from Gulf
states.
But reports abound that the migrants are mistreated, according to workers'
associations and human rights groups.
"Reports of foreign women working in domestic positions being beaten or
sexually abused by their employers and recruiting agents were common [in
2006]," said a US State Department report on Bahrain, where 130,000 Indians
work.
In one case in 2003, a 28-year-old Indian domestic worker was hospitalized
after being abused by her employer for three months, and received less than one
month's pay over the period, the report said.
The situation was equally grim for South Asian maids in the United Arab
Emirates, where close to 1 million Indians work, the State Department said.
A Bangladeshi woman who went to work in the country as a domestic servant was
thrown from a fourth-floor balcony last year by her five Bangladeshi
traffickers when she refused to work as a prostitute.
