NEW DELHI - The sweat of Indian migrant workers has long fuelled the oil-rich economies of West Asia. Even the Indian economy relies on them for the billions of dollars they remit home every year.

But amid the coronavirus pandemic, these workers in the Persian Gulf region have found themselves abandoned by both sides.

There is little support from their host countries while India's unrelenting position on its ban on international flights has made it impossible for them to return home.

The crisis has particularly worsened in the past week, with a surge in infected cases among Indians in the Gulf countries. In Kuwait, for instance, more than half of the 1,234 Covid-19 cases on Apr 12 involved Indians.

Besides being vulnerable to getting infected in their crammed "bed space" accommodations, growing retrenchment in recent weeks has also left thousands of them stranded without financial support.

"There are many people who have run out of cash, which has made it very difficult for them to arrange lodging and food," advocate Haris Beeran told The Straits Times.

On April 8, he filed a petition, on behalf of the Dubai Kerala Muslim Cultural Centre in the High Court in the southern Indian state of Kerala, urging the Indian government to give landing permission for flights evacuating jobless workers and others in a similar vulnerable position from the United Arab Emirates.

The UAE has offered to fly back Indians who do not test positive for Covid-19.

Mr Beeran said many among the vulnerable are labourers who have lost their jobs in recent weeks and Indians visiting family members who had expected to return home for medical care, such as chemotherapy and dialysis.

Medical treatment in the UAE is prohibitive for many of them, he added.

But despite calls to let stranded Indians return home, the government told the country's Supreme Court on Monday that it is not prepared to do it yet.

"The severe risk posed by arrivals from an increasing number of countries affected by COVID-19 is something the Government is seeking to minimise," the Ministry of External Affairs told the court.

The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region has more than eight million Indian workers, of whom more than half are blue-collar workers.

The top court is simultaneously hearing a clutch of petitions seeking the evacuation of Indian citizens from countries in West Asia as well as the United Kingdom and the United States.

India had banned international passenger flights on Mar 22 and has extended the ban until May 3, which is when the second phase of the nationwide lockdown is scheduled to end.

The GCC countries account for a sizeable chunk of remittances sent to India. In 2016-2017, total remittances stood at US$61.3 billion (S$87.2 billion); more than half of this came from the GCC countries.

According to the John Hopkins University's coronavirus tracker, the GCC countries reported 17,573 coronavirus cases and 122 deaths as at Wednesday (April 15).

Mr Ginu Zacharia Oommen, an expert on Indian migration to West Asia and a member of the Kerala Public Service Commission, said the scale of the pandemic has severely undermined the healthcare and quarantine facilities of countries in the Gulf region.

"Their inability to self-isolate given the lack of adequate quarantine health facilities has become a key concern for the Indian workers," he said. "If one person is infected in a flat, he doesn't have a place to be quarantined and the others do not have a place to go and stay. Ultimately, they all have to stay in the same place."

Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan had written a letter to India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi on April 9, flagging complaints received about "inadequate isolation and quarantine facilities" in the UAE and urging him to take the issue up with the government there.

Many Indian community organisations, especially those from Kerala, have stepped in to help rent buildings such as schools to house some of these workers.

Mr Vijayan sent another letter to Mr Modi on Monday, requesting the Indian government to arrange special flights to bring back those willing to return and even offering to arrange testing and quarantine facilities for those who come back to Kerala.

Mr Oommen said the government should focus on immediately flying out the most vulnerable amongst the stranded Indians. According to him, this group includes those whose visit visas have expired, those living there without any documentation, the unemployed, domestic workers as well as women and elderly dependents.

"They are vulnerable because, in their current situation, they do not have medical insurance and cannot access healthcare facilities," he said.

Certain neighbourhoods populated by Indians in these countries have been quarantined because of Covid-19 infections. An Indian social worker based in the UAE, who did not wish to be identified, told this newspaper that a "huge number" of people are being laid off every day.

"They are unable to move out or even travel back home. They are just sitting in their rooms along with other quarantined people. We cannot imagine the mental stress and other psychological impacts this situation has brought them," he said.

India's Ministry of External Affairs has argued in its statement to the court that India had evacuated some of its nationals as well as foreigners when the domestic Covid-19 situation was "not so grim". However its continuing refusal to let its citizens fly back home has not gone down well in the GCC region, particularly the UAE, which has around 2.8 million Indians living there.

On Sunday, the official Emirates News Agency said the the country is considering revising current labour-related partnerships with nations that have refused to repatriate their citizens who wish to return home.

The Indian ambassador to the UAE, Mr Pavan Kapoor, in an interview with the Gulf News last week, said it was wrong to say that India was abandoning its citizens.

"Once the lockdown in India is lifted, we will certainly help them get back to their home towns and their families," he told the paper.

Indian missions, the ambassador added, are working with local authorities to ensure the safety of Indians and have proposed to help set up quarantine and isolation facilities with support from the community. The local administration has also been working to ramp up its quarantine capacity, including by transforming five-star hotels into quarantine centres.

The impact of lockdowns has also been felt in south-east Asian countries, such as Malaysia and Thailand, which have migrant workers from neighbouring countries.

When Malaysia imposed its restrictions on the movement of people on March 18, reports emerged of problems faced by Indonesian migrants, many of whom are construction and factory workers as well as waitresses and janitors who earn daily or weekly wages.

It prompted Golkar Party lawmaker Christina Aryani to urge the Indonesian government to send them food and face masks through the country's embassy in Kuala Lumpur.

In Malaysia, as is the case in the Gulf region, many migrants live in packed residential units that make social distancing norms impossible.

Thailand, which began shutting down educational institutes and malls last month to implement social distancing, has also seen tens of thousands of migrants from neighbouring countries becoming jobless.

The International Organisation for Migration estimates that more than 100,000 workers have since returned home to Laos, Myanmar and Cambodia.