Sri Lankan Embassy to expand coverage of mobile services

The Sri Lankan Embassy has announced that it will be extending its mobile services to the northern parts of the Kingdom.
“Hitherto, our mobile services were only confined to the Eastern Province, but because of the growing demand we want to extend it to Hail and Buraidah in the northern parts of the Kingdom,” Vadivel Kirshnamoorthy, the island’s ambassador told Arab News on Thursday.
He said there is a regular flow of Sri Lankan workers coming into the Kingdom that are spread throughout the country. “We want to take our services to their doorstep,” he added.
Some 450,000 Sri Lankans are in the Kingdom, which is the largest concentration of the island’s 1.5 million workforce in the Middle East.
Regarding the problem of runaway housemaids, he said it has been reduced greatly following the end of the amnesty period.
Dwelling on the number of death cases among Sri Lankan housemaids, he said that according to the mission’s records, 128 deaths were registered last year and 32 cases have been reported in 2014 thus far. “An average number of 10 to 11 death cases are reported per month to the embassy,” he added.
He also stressed that there has been no reports on the removal of organs from the human remains dispatched from the Kingdom.
Krishnamoorthy pointed out that a good number of infants born in the Kingdom lack citizenship due to the non-availability of new contact details of the applicant.



However, any Sri Lankan can dial the toll free number 80011880050 to make arrangement for citizenship certificates, he explained.
In February, the embassy in Riyadh set up a 24-hour phone-in service to provide assistance to its distressed expatriate workers in the Kingdom.
The toll free number 8001180050 is a 24-hour helpline.
Krishnamoorthy said remittances from Lankan nationals working in the Middle East was estimated at $2.5 billion in 2010, adding that a “significant portion of the remittances comes from the 450,000 Sri Lankans working in the Kingdom.”
Around one-third of Sri Lanka’s 1.5 million overseas workers live in the Kingdom, he added.
He said that Sri Lankans have earned a reputation as disciplined, honest and hard-working residents in the Kingdom.
Kishnamoorthy expressed his deep appreciation for the generous amnesty granted by Custodian of Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah which gave undocumented expatriates the opportunity to respectfully exit the country and return to Sri Lanka or to rectify their status.
He said, “Over 100,000 expatriates had changed their professions and that approximately 15,000 Sri Lankans had left the Kingdom without facing any penalties.
The amnesty, he added, has also enabled those who returned to Sri Lanka to reapply for jobs and return to the Kingdom in the future, benefiting both the Sri Lankan and Saudi Arabian labor markets.”