Shocking! Indian workers on the Budapest-Belgrade railway project starving

The 42 Indian guest workers started a quiet strike and sat in front of the mayor’s office in Kraljevo, Serbia. 

According to Merce, the Serbian leftist Mašina said that the workers held signs on which they wrote that they have neither food nor water and that the company employing them has not given them food for 15 days.

The mayor’s office said that the Indians work for a subcontractor, have temporary contracts, and the company is officially owned by a US enterprise called IDEA Capital who are well-known in the sector for employing cheap labour force from the Indian subcontinent.

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As another Serbian daily reported in January, this is not the first scandal of this kind by the company. For example, another brigade worked on the Serbian sector of the Budapest-Belgrade railway upgrade, and the company refused to pay their wages. Furthermore,

they sent them home with only 5,000 dinars (EUR 45) even though they worked for 2.5 months.

The Serbian line is being built with Chinese and Russian financial aid, and most of the workers are from India, based on some earlier reports by the Serbian media. However, the conditions of work were bad even then. Even though they worked in the middle of winter, they lived in unheated, crowded barracks and received their payment irregularly. Even though compared to the Indian wages, they get high salaries in Serbia (EUR 320 per month), their employers do not pay consistently for the ever-fluctuating workers.