Dinesh Bhandari spent two days travelling by bus from his village in rural Nepal to Kathmandu to get a permit to take up a factory job he had been promised in Malaysia.
When he reached the Nepali capital, he found the door to the recruitment agency locked. A note on it read: “No labour permits will be issued by the government until further notice due to the coronavirus.”
The 22-year-old is one of a growing number of migrant workers hit by a wave of travel bans from Asia to the Middle East aimed at combating the virus.
Remittances are a crucial lifeline for families in Nepal and other countries in the region, including Bangladesh and India, which currently has more than 30 million people in jobs overseas, according to the International Labour Organization.
But travel restrictions aimed at slowing the spread of coronavirus, which has infected more than 245,000 people globally and killed more than 10,000, threaten to leave millions of South Asian migrant labourers without work.
In India, the families of about 750 fishermen stranded in Iran – one of the countries worst hit by the epidemic – are demanding that the government bring them home.
The men have said the Gulf fishing firms that hired them confiscated their passports and then transferred them to the Iranian coast from the UAE.
Fishermen largely from southern India have traditionally migrated to Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the UAE for lucrative jobs on fishing vessels, but have sometimes been accused by Iranian officials of trespassing.
And despite repeated assurances from Indian authorities, the men say they have been left stranded and without food.
“Why are we ignored? We have families too,” said Shanu Mariyadasan, a fisherman from India’s coastal Kerala state. “Are we supposed to die here?”
2020 Al Jazeera Media Network