Friday 19 / April / 2024
Muscat: Remittances to India from Oman have fallen due to demographic changes in Oman, including more blue collar workers settling in the country, money exchange houses report.
Oman remitted $3.47 billlion to India in 2014.
Admitting there has been a gradual drop in remittances to India, Tonny George Alexander, director of the Oman UAE Exchange, said this is due to demographic changes in Oman.
“More and more people from other nationalities are settling in Oman, other than Indians. So we are seeing a little drop in remittances to India,” he told Times of Oman on Monday.
This is despite there having been an increase in the number of Indians working in Oman.
According to National Centre for Statistics and Information (NCSI) data, the number of Indians working in Oman stood at 684,527 at the end of March 2016, while at the end of December 2015 it was 669,882.
In 2013, there were 599,473 Indians working in Oman.
This is occurring even though the Indian rupee is trading at relatively low levels against the US dollar, which means that Indian expats in the region could earn more.
“There has been an increase in the number of Indian expats, but most of these are blue collar workers so, remittance wise, it has suffered a little,” a general manager of another prominent money exchange house in Ruwi said.
Further, P K Subhudhi, general manager of the Mustafa Sultan Money Exchange, said people tend to hold onto their money when rates are low. “But whenever the rate goes up, we see a lot of people remitting money,” he said.
Remittances to India from Gulf countries suffered because of low oil prices, a recent report revealed.
“Almost half of the total remittances which India receives come from the Middle East, especially the UAE and Saudi Arabia, for which oil exports are a major source of revenues. With oil prices hammered and expected to fall even more, both the GDP growth and the budgets in these countries will be strained. This will have an adverse impact on employment conditions in these countries that, in turn, could taper remittances,” according to the report by Crisil, the Mumbai ratings and research company,which is part of S&P Global.
Remittances to India from the GCC declined by 2.2 per cent to $35.9 billion in the 12 months to March, compared to the same period one year earlier.
Its figures indicate that the UAE is the largest source of GCC remittances to India, followed by Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.
Earlier, Times of Oman reported that Oman has been named one of the top remittance senders in the world, based on GDP percentages, according to the 2016 World Bank migration and remittances fact book.
The aggregate outflows represent 12.6 per cent of Oman’s gross domestic product (GDP).
Oman’s GDP – which is measured by the monetary value of all finished goods and services - stood at RO27bn in 2015, according to statistics released by the National Centre for Statistics and Information (NCSI).
India is the largest recipient of remittances worldwide. According to the World Bank, total remittances to India last year fell to $69bn from $70bn in 2014.
