Over 14,000 Nepali migrant workers have died in the Gulf in fifteen years. Now a war they did not start has stranded 22 of their bodies in airports they will never walk through. Pramila Kumari Ram is waiting. She has been waiting since March 5. Her husband promised he would be home in April.
On the night of March 4, Ramesh Kumar Mochi called his wife from Kuwait. He was 35 years old, a man who had spent sixteen of those years working in foreign countries, Kuwait, Malaysia, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, sending money home to a village in Siraha district, in the Madhesh plains of southern Nepal, so that his family could eat and his son could grow. He had been in Kuwait for the most recent twenty-two months. In the phone call, he asked about Nepal’s parliamentary elections, which were happening the next day. He told Pramila, his wife, to vote for good people and young people. “The country will change after this election,” he said. He told her he planned to come home in April or May to see his son, Aryan, who was eighteen months old. Then he said goodnight. Pramila put down the phone and went to bed. The next morning, she walked to the polling centre at the community school in neighbouring Mohanpur village, voted with her in-laws, and came home at 2 in the afternoon to do the dishes.
A relative named Rahul arrived in the courtyard. He had news.
Ramesh had woken at two in the morning to take his blood-pressure medication. He collapsed reaching for the bottle. An ambulance arrived half an hour later. He was declared dead on arrival. In the village in Siraha, Pramila, who is 31 years old and has an eighteen-month-old son who will not remember his father, felt, she said, like collapsing. It did not feel real. She gathered herself and used Rahul’s phone to call back to Kuwait. And she has been waiting since then, sixteen days now and counting, for them to send her husband home. The body is ready. The embassy has issued the No Objection Certificate. The documentation is complete. But the airports in Kuwait are intermittently closed because Iran has attacked Kuwait International Airport twice since February 28, and the war between the United States, Israel, and Iran, a war being fought by governments Ramesh Kumar Mochi could not vote for, over interests he did not share, on land far from the labourer’s quarters where he slept, has made it impossible to move a dead man from the Gulf back to the wife who is waiting to bury him.
Ramesh is not alone in this waiting. Twenty-two bodies of Nepali migrant workers are currently stranded in the Gulf: eight in the UAE, seven in Kuwait, seven in Saudi Arabia. All of them completed all the required paperwork before the bombs started falling. All of them are ready to go home. None of them can. The airports are closed, the flights are cancelled, the airlines are prioritising passengers over cargo, and a body, the terminology the system uses for a human being who was working abroad and is now dead, costs around 25,000 Saudi riyals, approximately nine lakh Nepalese rupees, to transport as cargo. That cost has risen with the war, and the employers who are legally obligated to bear it are, in this chaos, difficult to compel.
This is the story, as reported. But the story as reported is only the surface. Beneath it is something much older, much larger, and much more shameful than a logistics problem created by a Gulf war.
Nepal is a country of astonishing natural beauty and catastrophic economic failure. It sits between India and China, two of the world’s most dynamic economies, and has managed to extract almost nothing from that proximity, not investment, not industrial development, not the kind of domestic employment that would give a young man from Siraha a reason to stay. What Nepal has managed to extract, and what has become, without exaggeration, the central fact of its economy, is the labour of its own people, exported to the Gulf and to Malaysia, exchanged for remittances that now constitute roughly 25 per cent of the country’s GDP.
Over 3.5 million Nepalis are working abroad at any given time. In FY2023/24, the remittances they sent home exceeded NPR 1,445 billion, approximately eleven billion US dollars. More than 741,000 Nepalis received approval for overseas work in that single year alone. Over six million labour permits have been issued since 2000. The majority of those permit-holders go to one of five countries: Qatar, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Malaysia. They go because Nepal’s economy, despite decades of development rhetoric and foreign aid and parliamentary sessions, has failed to generate enough work to keep its young men and women at home. The push is poverty, political instability, a lack of formal-sector employment, and the crushing costs of living relative to income. The pull is a Gulf labour market that needs their hands, for construction, for security, for cleaning, for the thousand forms of essential invisible labour that builds the cities and stadiums and airports of the Arabian Peninsula and that nobody there will do for the wages that Nepalis will accept.
Over 14,000 Nepali workers have died abroad in the last fifteen years. The number is almost certainly an undercount. It reflects only those deaths that families reported to official channels, only those bodies that found their way home. The government’s own figures show 1,401 bodies repatriated in FY2024/25 alone, a figure that breaks down, with quiet devastation, into the ages of the dead: 29 under twenty, 172 between twenty-one and twenty-five, 233 between twenty-six and thirty. Young men in the first decade of their working lives, dying abroad, their bodies rolling out of baggage claim on luggage carts at Tribhuvan International Airport in Kathmandu, delivered in the middle of the night by drivers who call themselves “the coffin guy” and who know which rural highways the police will let you use after dark if you are carrying a casket.
The causes of death are, in the official records, almost uniformly listed as “natural causes” or “cardiac arrest.” The reality, as researchers and human-rights organisations have documented with increasing specificity, is more complex and more damning. Workers in the Gulf are exposed to extreme heat, outdoor temperatures routinely exceeding 45 degrees Celsius in summer months, while performing manual labour on construction sites, under conditions of chronic overwork, inadequate rest, poor nutrition, and employer-controlled housing that allows little recovery between shifts. A 2025 Human Rights Watch report documented Nepali workers in Saudi Arabia who were electrocuted, decapitated in machinery accidents, and killed by falling from construction sites, whose deaths were nonetheless classified as natural causes in official records. The classification matters because natural-cause deaths rarely trigger compensation. It matters because employers in Gulf countries have a financial incentive to classify every death as natural, and because the Nepali embassies are so chronically understaffed, seven people managing tens of thousands of cases, at one embassy, according to advocates, that the capacity to challenge a classification is effectively zero.
This is not a failure of occasional bad actors. It is, as the Springer Journal of Human Rights and Social Work concluded in a 2025 paper, “a pervasive system of exploitation where the pursuit of economic opportunity abroad often devolves into a perilous gamble with human lives and dignity.” The gambling is not random. The odds are structurally stacked. The house always wins.
The men who go to the Gulf do not go because they want to. They go because Nepal gave them no other option, and because the recruitment industry that profits from their departure has built an infrastructure of false promise that is almost impossible to see through until you are already there.
A migrant worker from a village in Karnali or Sudurpaschim or Siraha typically pays a recruiter, an agent often operating through informal networks, sometimes licensed, sometimes not, between fifty thousand and one lakh Nepali rupees in recruitment fees before he ever boards a plane. He borrows this money. He mortgages land, or takes a loan from a moneylender at usurious rates, or empties the family savings that were supposed to be a safety net. He then arrives in Qatar or Kuwait or Riyadh to discover that the job described in the contract does not exist, or the salary is lower than agreed, or the living conditions are barracks shared with thirty men and a single toilet, or the employer confiscates his passport as a matter of routine policy. He cannot leave without the employer’s permission because the kafala sponsorship system, the legal framework that ties a migrant worker’s residency status to a single employer, means that leaving a job without consent is effectively illegal in most Gulf states. He can be deported. He can be imprisoned. He is not, in the meaningful sense, free.
In Nepal’s most impoverished provinces, 62 per cent of the poorest households have a family member working abroad. The migration is not a choice made from strength. It is a choice made from the absence of any better option, the product of a state that has spent thirty years of multi-party democracy failing to build the domestic economy that would make staying home viable. Nepal received over eleven billion dollars in remittances in FY2023/24. It spent that money on imports, on consumption, on the grinding daily maintenance of a population that cannot earn enough at home. The remittances did not build factories. They did not build roads that opened new markets. They did not create the conditions for the next generation not to have to leave. They went into the void that the state left behind, and the state noted the inflow with satisfaction and reduced the urgency of the structural reforms it had been promising for three decades. The remittance economy is not a development strategy. It is an anaesthetic, dulling the pain of under-development so thoroughly that the patient no longer screams, and the surgeon concludes that there is nothing left to fix.
The worker goes, the money comes back, the family survives another year, the son grows up watching his father leave and understanding, as children understand the lesson written around them, that this is how it works here.
Now the war. Since February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel have carried out thousands of strikes on Iran. Iran has responded with waves of drones and missiles targeting Gulf states: Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman, the UAE. According to GCC government sources, as of March 16, the attacks had killed at least eleven civilians and injured 268 more, with the majority of victims being migrant workers. Dubai airport has been attacked three times. Kuwait International Airport has been attacked twice. The airports open and close on the rhythm of the strikes, and the airlines, carrying tens of thousands of South Asian workers trying to escape a war they have no part in, prioritise passengers over cargo when the windows of flight availability are narrow. Bodies cannot be moved from Kuwait to Saudi Arabia by land due to legal complications. Special cargo flights are prohibitively expensive. Nepal Airlines, the only carrier that could arrange government-facilitated repatriation in bulk, does not have the operational capacity or the political will to charter special flights to retrieve the bodies of men who died of high blood pressure in a labourer’s room at two in the morning.
Six thousand Nepalis in the Gulf have formally applied to return home. The airports open and close. The queue grows.
A Nepali worker named Dibas, educated, working as a security guard at Abu Dhabi’s Zayed International Airport, a man whose social media was filled with photographs in uniform and messages to his parents, posted about his fears regarding the conflict hours before he was killed on duty by shrapnel from an intercepted missile. He had told his family on a video call that he would be home on leave in two months. He was killed before the two months were up, by a fragment of a war his country had no say in, on the territory of a country that regarded him as essential labour and not as a human being with a family in Borlang village who are now, as his father Cham Bahadur says, paralysed by grief.
The war did not cause the problem. It revealed it, or rather, it revealed it again, as COVID-19 revealed it in 2020, when international flights grounded and thousands of Nepali workers were stranded in Gulf labour camps without income, without adequate food, without the ability to go home, and without any meaningful emergency response from Kathmandu. The machinery that should protect these men and women has never worked reliably in peace. It works even less in war. The same infrastructure of neglect that allowed over fourteen thousand deaths in fifteen years, the understaffed embassies, the unverified death certificates, the compensation processes that take years and multiple intermediaries and frequently produce nothing, is the infrastructure that now stands between twenty-two dead men in Gulf refrigerators and the families in Nepal who are waiting to hold their last rites.
Ram Narayan, Ramesh’s fifty-five-year-old father, is in regular contact with the company and the Nepali embassy. He has approached the ward chair, the municipality, the influential people of the area. Everyone tells him they are trying. “I have sought help from everyone,” he says. “My son Ramesh was the main support of our family. He went abroad to take on that responsibility. Now that he is gone, I don’t know how we will manage the household or raise the grandchildren. We don’t know when flights will resume or when his body will arrive. Each day is becoming harder to bear.”
Each day. In Siraha. Pramila doing the dishes again, Aryan pulling at her sari, the phone not ringing with the news she needs, the courtyard empty of the relative who will come to tell her that her husband’s body has finally arrived at Tribhuvan, that the coffin driver is driving through the night toward Siraha, that Ramesh Kumar Mochi, who worked sixteen years in foreign countries and called home on March 4 and said the country will change after this election and asked his wife to vote for good people, can finally be buried, can finally be mourned, can finally rest.
There is a word for what Nepal has built, for the economic arrangement that sends 3.5 million of its citizens abroad, that accepts over eleven billion dollars of their earnings as the primary engine of national survival, that labels this arrangement a “development strategy” in government papers and international donor briefings, while doing almost nothing to ensure that the people powering it come home alive.
The word is extraction.
Nepal extracts from its own citizens. It extracts their labour years, their youth, their health, their presence in their children’s early lives, their proximity to their ageing parents. It extracts the risk of death in a desert from heat and overwork. It extracts the psychological cost of years of isolation in a system designed to ensure their powerlessness. And when they die, when they die of cardiac arrest at two in the morning reaching for a blood-pressure tablet, when they die of electrocution on a Saudi construction site, when they die from shrapnel at an airport in Abu Dhabi, it extracts from their families the labour of grief, the administrative burden of bringing the body home, the debt of paying for the repatriation that the employer was supposed to cover. The families receive one million Nepali rupees, approximately 7,500 US dollars, as relief support from the government. A lump sum and a form, for sixteen years of a man’s life and the eighteen months he never got to watch his son grow.
Nepal is not unique in this. India, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, all of them have built remittance-dependent economies on the exported labour of their poorest citizens. What is particular to Nepal is the combination of scale, 25 per cent of GDP, the highest remittance-to-GDP ratio in South Asia, and the depth of governance failure that surrounds it. The 2025 research paper in the Journal of Human Rights and Social Work identified “critical vulnerabilities systematically intensified by insufficient pre-departure safeguards, fraudulent recruitment practices fueled by a fragmented and captured policy network, and chronically weak enforcement protocols.” In July 2024, Nepal’s Department of Foreign Employment suspended the licences of over 580 manpower companies for fraudulent practices. Five hundred and eighty companies. Not rogue operators. Not isolated bad actors. An industry. An industry that Nepal’s state was licensing, regulating, and failing to control, while taking its cut in the form of the foreign exchange that made the central bank’s balance sheet look stable.
The families of Siraha and Dang and Sindhupalchok and Khotang and Salyan wait with a specific kind of waiting, not the waiting of uncertainty but the waiting of people who know the outcome and cannot yet receive it. They know their husband, their son, their father is dead. They know he is in a cold-storage unit in Kuwait or Saudi Arabia or Dubai. They know the paperwork is done. They know it is the war, the airports, the airlines, the cargo regulations, the cost of a special flight that stands between them and the body. They know all of this and can do nothing with any of it, because the system that was supposed to protect the living and return the dead has never, in any of its forms, treated these families as constituents rather than as variables.
Khushiram Chaudhary of Dang is waiting in Kuwait. Samjhana Gole of Sindhupalchok. Kopila Dhami of Udayapur. Basanta Rai of Khotang. Yamuna Sunar of Salyan. Krishna Ramja Budha of Salyan. Laxmi Narayan Thapa of Gulmi. Ram Jatan Thakur of Dhanusha. Binod KC of Kathmandu. Pawan Prasad Sharma of Kathmandu. Dulari Prasad Chaudhary of Rupandehi. Jeevan Shrestha. Binod Prasad Shah. Eight more in the UAE. All of them waiting. All of them completed. All of them held by a war they had nothing to do with, in a system of labour extraction they had no power to refuse, in countries that needed them alive and cannot be bothered to send them home now that they are dead.
Five bodies from Qatar came home on March 16. Qatar Airways, to its credit, brought all five in a single day. They were: Sunil Kapar of Dhanusha, Niraj Kafle of Bara, Surya BK of Lamjung, Bhakta Bahadur Khawas of Jhapa, Lok Bahadur Thapa of Gorkha. Five men. Five families in Nepal who can now light the funeral pyre, observe the rites, begin the mourning that is also, in its way, the beginning of the rest of their lives. Five coffins in the cargo hold of a plane, and the families waiting at the arrivals gate, and the coffin driver driving through the night on the rural highway where the police let you pass after dark if you are carrying a casket.
This should not be news. That five bodies came home is not an achievement. It is the minimum. It is the absolute floor of what these men were owed, not by the Gulf states, not by the airlines, not by the war, but by the country that sent them.
Nepal has a new government forming. Balendra Shah, the former mayor of Kathmandu, is to be sworn in as Prime Minister on March 27. He will inherit, among everything else, this: 22 bodies waiting in the Gulf, 6,000 living workers waiting for flights home, and a remittance economy that is the spine of national survival and the most comprehensive single evidence of the state’s failure to create the conditions in which its citizens do not have to choose between poverty and peril.
The new government will be asked many questions. About stability, about China, about electricity, about the price of cooking gas and the future of the constitution. But the question that matters most, the question that Pramila Kumari Ram is sitting with in Siraha, with an eighteen-month-old boy who will not remember his father, is simpler than any of those. It is this: how long will Nepal keep sending its sons to build other countries and burying them in foreign soil before it decides that the cost of keeping them at home is less than the cost of bringing them back in boxes?
Ramesh Kumar Mochi said the country will change after this election. He said it on the night of March 4, to his wife, in the last conversation they will ever have. He was a man who worked sixteen years abroad and still believed in the possibility of home. He deserves to come home. He deserves to be buried in the earth of Siraha, by the people who loved him, in the country he spent his adult life paying for, not in an airport cold-storage unit in Kuwait, waiting for a war between governments he never elected to decide when it is convenient for him to travel.
He deserves better. Pramila deserves better. Aryan deserves better. And the next man from the next village who will borrow fifty thousand rupees to pay a recruiter and board a plane to Qatar deserves, at the absolute minimum, a state that has decided his life is worth more than the remittance it will miss when he is gone.
That state does not yet exist. Until it does, the coffins will keep coming. The country will keep waiting. And the driver will keep saying, with his dark smirk, that they call him the coffin guy, and nobody will laugh, because there is nothing funny about a country that has made the return of its dead routine.
