The maybe-escape from Benghazi

Anita Devi's son, Vishal, trapped in Libya, highlights exploitation by fake job agents in Uttar Pradesh.

Anita Devi, 48, barely eats two meals a day. Her leaky roofed two-bedroom house in Sihorwa village in Uttar Pradesh’s Gorakhpur district requires urgent repair. But she cannot stop thinking about her 22-year-old son Vishal Sahani, who left for Libya in June 2023, for what appeared to be a well-paying job at the Libyan Cement Company in Benghazi, the war-torn North African country’s second largest city.

“I think of him all the time. On the phone, when he tells me he often goes hungry, my heart sinks,” Devi says, her eyes welling up, as she looks forlornly onto the dirt road that leads to the village from her house.

Two of Devi’s family members are at the factory in Benghazi, “one of the largest cement production companies in Libya” founded in 1968 with a total production capacity of 2.9 million tons, says the company’s website. The Sahanis are among 16 Indian men, 13 of whom are from the Gorakhpur district. They have been at the factory for times ranging between one and five years. The other three are from western Bihar.

Their stories are starkly similar: rural distress, poverty, and joblessness leading them to traps laid out by a wide network of fake employment agents working across the region who prey on the vulnerabilities of such communities by promising them lucrative jobs largely in West Asia and North Africa.

With prison-like conditions, work hours that stretch to 16-hour days, and odd and unscheduled shifts, their passports are confiscated on arrival in the guise of ‘updating their visa status’. For the past four months, these men have been without work or wages, following a confrontation with their ‘contractor’ Abu Bakkr, a Libyan national, over unscheduled shifts and extra work hours.

Two of the men say Bakkr facilitated their travel from Dubai to Benghazi. Bakkr had obtained tourist visas and not work permits, which could have allowed them legal status in Libya, but such permits are expensive, says Vijay Sahani, 31. His younger brother, Rajkumar, 28, had travelled to work at the cement factory in 2022. Rajkumar had suggested Vishal join him.

Devi’s family belongs to the Nishad community in U.P. They are categorised as Other Backward Classes but have been demanding that they be identified as a Scheduled Caste. This demand was supported by former Chief Minister and Samajwadi Party leader Akhilesh Yadav but was stalled by the courts.