Rs 5 Lakh Debt, Alleged Abuse: Inside the Ordeal of 300 Indian Workers in Milan

Before leaving India, each Indian worker had handed over Rs 5 lakh to secure a three-year Italian residence permit.

Before leaving India, each Indian worker had handed over Rs 5 lakh (about €5,000) to be hired and to secure a three-year Italian residence permit.

(Photo: Aroop Mishra/The Quint)

On 20 May, the Indian Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) released a joint declaration by the governments of India and Italy, issued at the close of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's two-day visit to Bel Paese, an Italian phrase meaning "the beautiful country".

Point 25 of that declaration records that Modi and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni discussed deepening cooperation to fight irregular migration, labour exploitation, and human trafficking, and to ensure safe and legal migration.

Yet, even as the two leaders traded Melody toffees and posed for selfies at the Colosseum, the Italian judiciary was quietly moving files—building a case into the alleged forced labour of some 300 Indian workers constructing a US consulate in Milan, a 10-acre project budgeted at about Rs 3,340 crore ($351.2 million).

Six days later, on 26 May—the ink on that pledge to combat trafficking and ensure safe migration barely dry—Milan prosecutors placed the Italian branch of the US construction giant Caddell Construction under investigation over the alleged exploitation of those very workers at the new consulate site.

Paid Just Rs 222 an Hour After Deductions

The decree reads like an indictment of the declaration. Wages ran between about Rs 89,000 and Rs 1.55 lakh a month (€800 to €1,400) for roughly 60-hour weeks—six days a week, 6 am to 6 pm. From that, the employer deducted around Rs 55,000 (€500) for housing and Rs 33,000 to Rs 41,000 (€300 to €370) for meals, leaving workers with a take-home of about half the Italian poverty threshold.

Life on the site, prosecutors wrote, was "harsh and devoid of any human sensitivity," with team leaders driven by deadline pressure into a hostile, peremptory treatment of the men beneath them, pushing them into tasks their contracts never mentioned.

And the workers had paid for the privilege. Before leaving India, each had handed over Rs 5 lakh (about €5,000) to be hired and to secure a three-year Italian residence permit. To the Italian state, meanwhile, the contractor's visa applications told a different story: each man, it declared, was a highly specialised worker earning more than Rs 26.6 lakh a year (€24,000).

The Italian Labour Inspectorate investigation quotes workers who say the employer warned they would be fired or "sent back to India" if they refused the terms. After deductions, prosecutors found, the men earned an average of just €2 (Rs 222) an hour.

'Forced to Sign Documents I Didn't Understand'

According to a local Italian media report citing the investigation, one of the labourers interviewed described the system of cash extractions. "Yes, lunch was provided by the company," he said, "but I had to pay €6.50 a day. At the end of the month about €300-350 in cash to an Indian employee of Caddell's human resources department (...) I was forced to give that money because he threatened me all the time."

Another recounted:

"I had to sign other papers whose contents I did not understand, but I was forced to sign them."

Prosecutors have placed Caddell under investigation for corporate administrative liability, and a company manager—the Turkish national Ulas Demir—for forced labour. At the peak of construction, the decree says, 450 to 500 workers were deployed, shuttled between two residences in the Milan area and the site.

When investigators came to take statements from those still at work—a process set to continue in the coming days—the report adds, there was tension with site managers. A judicial administrator will now oversee working conditions, regularise the employment relationships, and ensure the exploitation does not continue.

Manfred Bergmann of CADI (Comitato Antirazzista Durban Italia), the Italian committee for the implementation of the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action (adopted in 2001 at the UN World Conference against Racism), tells The Quint that what is happening at the site of the new US Consulate in Milan "is not an accident—it is a system."

The Indian workers, he alleges, were smuggled in under a visa the Meloni government treats as reserved for "highly skilled" staff posted by the company—a fiction that strips them of the right Italian law has always guaranteed: to change employer.

"Without it they cannot leave, cannot go home, and dare not protest, because any complaint means expulsion. Their silence is not consent. It is fear written into law," Bergmann claims.

He adds that not only the recruiters who sold the false jobs are guilty, but also Caddell and the Italian state, which approves barely one in 10 regularisation applications while exploitation grows.

"Importing indebted workers to be trapped here is not a cure for our labour shortage; it is transnational slavery in the uniform of immigration policy. These are racist laws, and they must change."

Manfred Bergmann

Meanwhile, a US State Department spokesperson told The Quint that they are investigating the allegations.

"US law enforcement is working in full cooperation with Italian authorities. The US government does not tolerate labour exploitation," they said in an emailed response.

Latest in Dispatch

Milan is not an aberration. It is the latest dispatch from a pattern India has chosen not to see—one that runs straight through the very pledge Modi signed in Rome. Across at least four continents of risk, the same government that promised to ensure safe and legal migration has presided over its opposite.

Take Russia. Two weeks ago, the Indian government told the Supreme Court that 217 Indian nationals had reportedly joined the Russian armed forces amid the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war, and 49 have lost their lives in the conflict. Most were duped by agents with promises of well-paid jobs and a Russian passport, then pushed to the Ukrainian front. The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has booked 19 recruiters and entities. Young men from Kerala, Gujarat and Punjab have come home in coffins—or not at all.

Take Israel. After October 2023, as it shut out Palestinian labour, India sent more than 20,000 workers—construction hands and caregivers—into an active war zone, recruited at stadium-sized drives in Lucknow and Rohtak.

In March 2024, Patnibin Maxwell, a worker from Kerala, was killed by a Hezbollah missile in the Galilee. The recruitment drives did not stop.

Take Southeast Asia. More than 6,700 Indians have been rescued from cyber-scam compounds in Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos—lured by fake IT jobs, then held behind barbed wire and forced to run crypto and romance frauds under threat of violence. India flew nearly 300 home on a single air force flight from the Thai border last year; the UN counts hundreds of thousands trapped across the region.

And then the Gulf, the oldest corridor of all, where more than 9 million Indians work—the largest concentration of Indian migrants anywhere—most under the kafala sponsorship system, where wage theft and recruitment debt are structural, not incidental.

What links Milan to Moscow's trenches, the Galilee, and Myawaddy's compounds is not bad luck. It is recruitment debt—the Rs 5 lakh paid upfront that turns a worker into a hostage of his own loan—and the absence of a state willing to treat that debt as the crime it is.

India is not a bystander to this economy. It is its biggest beneficiary. In 2024, it received $129 billion in remittances, more than any country on earth—14.3 percent of the global total, the highest share for any nation since 2000.

It is also a release valve for joblessness at home. India's youth unemployment (15-29) was 9.9 percent in 2025, rising to 13.6 percent in cities; the World Bank's modelled rate for 15–24-year-olds runs near 16 percent. When salaried jobs don't come, a Rs 5 lakh loan against a passport to Milan or Moscow starts to look like a plan.

India's Migration Paradox

This is the contradiction at the core of Indian migration policy: the country harvests the remittances but outsources the risk to the migrant.

In May 2026, days after Rome, India's delegation sat at the second International Migration Review Forum in New York, where states adopted a Progress Declaration reaffirming the Global Compact's promise of safe, orderly, and regular migration. There, Minister of State Kirti Vardhan Singh described an approach built around the "welfare, protection and empowerment" of emigrants, and showcased the eMigrate platform as a model of digital worker protection.

Yet, eMigrate never reached the Milan workers at all.

Emigration clearance—the core legal safeguard the system administers under the Emigration Act, 1983—is mandatory only for the 18 notified "Emigration Check Required" (ECR) countries, every one of them in the Gulf, West Asia or Southeast Asia. Italy is not among them.

The protection India was showcasing in New York had no jurisdiction over the men being exploited on a US government site in Milan.

The ECR list was built to shield blue-collar workers from the Gulf's worst abuses; the Milan workers were waved through on the opposite assumption—that the West needs no such safeguard. Their case is the proof that the binary is obsolete. Exploitation has outgrown the geography India built its protections around.

A worker earning €2 an hour on that consulate floor—who paid Rs 5 lakh for the privilege and signed papers he could not read—is the measure of what those words are worth. Safe, orderly, regular migration is not a communiqué. It is a worker who comes home alive, and with his wages.

The Quint has contacted the Italian branch of Caddell Construction, the Indian Embassy in Italy, the Italian Embassy in India, and the MEA, and will update this report on receiving their responses.

(Rejimon Kuttappan is an independent journalist from Kerala. He is a workers’ rights researcher, forced labour investigator, and author of 'Undocumented'. This is an opinion piece, and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses, nor is responsible for the same.)