His radio show could save your life

The National


His radio show could save your life

by Suryatapa Bhattacharya

April 19. 2008
KV Shamsudheen (left) gestures during his live radio program, which airs every Monday night on Asianet, an Indian radio station. For more than a decade, KV Shamsudheen has been accustomed to being roused in the dead of night by phone calls from fellow Indians and other Asians so overwhelmed by debt they are on the brink of suicide.

“Sometimes I say, ‘Please, my brother, you can call me any time you like. I am ready to listen to your problems, share your feelings’,” he said.

Mr Shamsudheen makes his living as the director of a Dubai-based stock brokerage. However, he spends most of his time running Pravasi Bandhu, literally “friend of the expatriates” in Sanskrit, a charity that helps low income workers manage their debts and put aside a little money for the future.

Many of his callers know him from his radio show on financial planning and investment broadcast by Asianet, an Indian station based at Dubai’s Media City, every Monday night for the past three years.

Mr Shamsudheen estimates that between his radio show and the people who somehow discover his mobile telephone number, he can be called up to four or five times a minute.

He says his callers were mostly workers who cannot cope with paying off debts and sending money home, and that he tries to talk with as many of them as he can to prevent the worst.

“Many suicides are related to financial hardship,” Mr Shamsudheen said. “So I will tell them this is not the solution. If you are thinking this kind of thing, then first think about your family and children. The family will be worse off than they are today.”

His family, he says, no longer complains when he takes calls at odd hours. He says he usually talks to the often frantic callers for half an hour. First, he calms them down, then he lets them know there is someone they can talk to.

“When they feel that someone is listening to their problems, then that itself is part of the solution because here they don’t have anyone to talk to,” he said.

Two years ago, Mr Shamsudheen set up a new offshoot of Pravasi Bandhu called Sandwanam, which roughly means “comfort”, with the aim of stemming the growing number of Indians committing suicide in the UAE over financial troubles.

“We cannot help them financially and suicide is not a solution, but we try to show them how to cope,” said Mr Shamsudheen, who noted that in his 38 years of living in the Gulf he rarely encountered Indian workers planning to return to their country.

“Your objective, when you come here, is to provide a quality of life for yourself and your family but also keep retirement in mind,” he said. “It is possible for the lowest paid Indian worker to save.”

He said his advice to many workers was simple: save Dh50, or about 500 rupees, a month. In 30 years, the figure could stand at 2.5 million rupees, a comfortable retirement package. But he warned that many failed to do so.

“They very systematically send money back home, otherwise their families wouldn’t survive,” he said. But in most cases the families spend all the money and save very little or none at all.

When he established Pravasi Bandhu in 2001, Mr Shamsudheen conducted a survey of 10,000 Indians, mostly from middle and lower income groups, about their saving habits.

“The results were alarming,” he said. Many of them build houses in India they are not able to maintain when they return because they have no savings.

He added that being an NRI, or non-resident Indian, could be prestigious in the foreign worker’s home country, so their families often spent all their money to maintain that image.

“The mistake they make when they send money home is to say: ‘This is family expenditure’. So the family spends it all. Instead he should say: ‘Save some, spend some’. When they return for good, all this disappears. It is a sad situation.”

Some labourers who have returned to India after working in the Gulf for more than 30 years were even told by their wives to return to the Middle East so the family could continue to live well, he said.

Labourers earn an average of Dh700 a month, but their trek to find work is often a costly one.

They borrow from lenders, sell family jewellery or mortgage their land to pay unscrupulous agents or recruiters up to Dh10,000 for passage to countries like the UAE.

“Once they arrive here, the families think the breadwinner is in the Gulf, so they have to upgrade their lifestyle,” said Mr Shamsudheen. “Now the family demands more money and there is also that loan to pay off.”

As a result, some resort to taking additional loans from banks, credit card companies or private lenders who charge interest rates as high as 12 per cent. Add to that the rising cost of living.

“But salaries haven’t [kept up],” said Mr Shamsudheen.

He said he cannot help everyone, but that the small victories keep him going.

“If you show mercy to people in the world, God will show you mercy,”
said Mr Shamsudheen. “It’s God’s promise.”