A Dead Worker, Stolen Passports, and Silence at the Top: The EKAA HRIM Scandal Guyana Cannot Afford to Bury

BY: Hem Kumar                               

𝙏𝙝𝙚 592 𝙂𝙪𝙖𝙧𝙙𝙞𝙖𝙣

There is a man named Sekhar Chhetri who will not be going home.

He will not board a return flight to India. He will not collect the wages he was owed. He will not see the family he left behind when he travelled thousands of miles to work at a quarry carved into the hills of Batavia, Region Seven — a quarry that was commissioned with fanfare, blessed by the presence of Guyana’s Head of State, and left to operate in a remote jungle with virtually no labour oversight for years.

Sekhar Chhetri is dead. His colleagues — thirty-eight Indian nationals — sit in Georgetown demanding only three things: their passports, their unpaid wages, and a flight home.
They should not have had to beg for any of those things.
That they did — and that it took public outrage, social media exposure, and opposition pressure to force even a government response — is not merely a labour dispute. It is a national indictment.

THE ARCHITECTURE OF EXPLOITATION
Let us be precise about what has been documented, because precision matters when powerful interests prefer vagueness.
The contracts signed by workers at EKAA HRIM Earth Resources Management are not merely aggressive — they are, on multiple points, flatly illegal under Guyanese law. Workers were required to pay USD $3,000 if dismissed and USD $5,000 if they resigned or “absconded” — a term the contract applied to any worker who left the site without written employer permission. Under Guyana’s own Labour Act, mandatory financial penalties for resignation are entirely unenforceable.

These contracts do not reflect hard bargaining. They reflect a deliberate design to trap. The abuse of overtime provisions compounds this. The contracts stipulated that base salary covered 72 hours of work per week — a direct violation of the National Minimum Wage Order. Overtime compensation was denied if extra hours were worked to meet production targets or compensate for weather delays. Guyana Labour Law is unambiguous: overtime is mandatory for any work beyond standard limits, regardless of operational circumstances. EKAA HRIM did not misinterpret the law. It chose to ignore it.

Passports were confiscated. Workers reported never receiving a physical payslip. Salaries were delayed for months. Food was inadequate. Medical access was limited. One worker lost four fingers in a workplace accident under allegedly substandard occupational safety conditions. And on May 12, 2026, Sekhar Chhetri died at the quarry site.

The company’s response to his death — issuing a press statement attributing it to a heart attack while accusing social media of spreading “misleading information” — may or may not reflect the medical facts. But coming from an employer that simultaneously held workers’ passports, withheld their wages, and imposed illegal contract penalties, it carries the credibility of a confession dressed as a denial.

THIS IS NOT AN ADMINISTRATIVE MATTER — IT IS A CRIMINAL ONE
Guyana’s Combating of Trafficking in Persons Act is explicit. Any person who, for the purpose of trafficking, knowingly confiscates or possesses the passport of another person commits an offence punishable by a fine of one million dollars and up to five years’ imprisonment. The law does not provide an exception for employers who claim they held documents for “security” or “safety” reasons. There is no such exception.

Confiscating a worker’s passport is not a policy decision. It is a crime.
The Ministry of Labour’s decision to treat passport seizure, wage theft, illegal contracts, unsafe conditions, and a worker’s death as matters to be resolved through a 24-hour response deadline and dialogue with management is not proportionate to the gravity of what has occurred. Critics are correct to call it what it is: the ministry is treating a statutory criminal offence as an administrative inconvenience. That signals to every abusive employer operating in Guyana’s remote interior that the gap between the law on paper and the law in practice is wide enough to exploit indefinitely.

A joint investigation team has been mobilised — the Ministry of Labour, the Guyana Police Force, and the Trafficking in Persons Unit. That is structurally correct. But mobilisation is not accountability. The question is not whether investigators will visit Batavia. The question is whether anyone will be prosecuted.

THE SHADOW OVER THE STATE
This scandal does not exist in isolation. It exists in a specific political geography that Guyanese citizens understand even when officials refuse to name it.
The quarry at Batavia was not opened quietly. It was commissioned by President Irfaan Ali. The company’s principal, Saju Bhaskar, is a Coimbatore-based businessman who also owns Texila American University Guyana — an institution that itself recruits students from the same Indian subcontinent whose nationals now sit in Georgetown demanding only their documents and their wages.

The proximity between the country’s highest office and this employer is not incidental background detail. It is central to understanding why thirty-eight workers could be exploited for months, in some cases years, in a remote Region Seven quarry without a single labour inspection, without payslips, without functioning safety protocols, and without anyone in authority intervening until social media forced the issue into the open.

When a Head of State commissions an employer’s facility, that employer acquires something more valuable than a photograph. They acquire the reasonable expectation — whether or not it is ever explicitly granted — that the instruments of State will not move against them with urgency. The thirty-eight Indian nationals at EKAA Quarry did not invent that expectation. The pattern of non-intervention over months and years created it.

The opposition’s intervention — raising six formal demands including full wage payment, compensation for the injured worker who lost his fingers, compensation for Sekhar Chhetri’s family, and EKAA HRIM bearing all repatriation costs — performed a duty of care that the government itself abdicated. That the workers reportedly refused a private audience with the Indian High Commissioner and insisted on having the opposition leader present tells its own story. These men did not trust that a quiet, closed meeting would serve their interests. Given everything they had experienced, they were right to be cautious.

WHAT FESTERS WHEN NOTHING HAPPENS
If this scandal is managed rather than resolved — if it dissolves into a quietly closed investigation, a company that faces no prosecution, workers who are repatriated without full compensation, and a ministry statement declaring compliance going forward — the damage will be far greater than the immediate injustice to thirty-eight individuals.
Consider what normalisation produces.

Guyana is no longer a peripheral economy. It is one of the fastest-growing oil economies on the planet. Foreign capital is flowing in at historic rates. Foreign workers are following. The infrastructure of exploitation documented at Batavia — illegal contracts, passport seizure, wage theft, remote locations that discourage scrutiny — is a template that other unscrupulous operators will apply if they see it go unpunished. The message sent by impunity is always the same: this is permissible here.
Guyana’s international standing cannot absorb that message.

Human rights bodies, international labour organisations, diplomatic partners, and global financial institutions are watching how this country governs the human cost of its resource boom. The United States Department of State’s annual Trafficking in Persons Report monitors exactly this category of abuse. The International Labour Organisation tracks forced labour indicators — and passport confiscation, movement restrictions, debt bondage through punitive resignation clauses, and withheld wages are among the clearest indicators on that list.

Guyana does not need to be formally designated a trafficking haven to suffer the reputational and diplomatic consequences of a high-profile case that ends without prosecution.
India, for its part, is not a passive observer. Union Labour Minister Mansukh Mandaviya has publicly stated that his ministry is monitoring the situation and will take every possible step for the betterment of affected workers.

India and Guyana share deepening diplomatic and economic ties. The death of an Indian national under disputed circumstances, in conditions that Indian authorities are now scrutinising, is a bilateral issue with real consequences. Guyana cannot afford to have New Delhi draw conclusions about the safety of its nationals in this country based on the outcome of how this case is handled.

THE GHOST OF INDENTURSHIP
There is a history in this country that makes the EKAA HRIM scandal feel like something older and more sinister than a modern labour dispute.

Guyana was built on indentured labour. Indian workers were brought across oceans under contract terms that promised one thing and delivered another. Their passports — their papers — were held by those with power over them. They worked in remote locations. They had no effective recourse. The architecture of the indenture system was designed to make leaving more costly than staying, and to ensure that the law, when it existed at all, moved slowly enough that the powerful could act with near-impunity.

At EKAA Quarry in 2026, the passports replaced the indenture papers. The remote Cuyuni-Mazaruni quarry replaced the sugar estate. The politically connected owner replaced the colonial plantation manager. The Labour Ministry’s delayed response replaced the colonial magistrate’s indifference. The vocabulary has been modernised. The architecture has not changed enough.
Guyana fought — and continues to fight — to define itself beyond that history. Its Constitution enshrines freedom of movement. Its Labour Act protects workers. Its Trafficking in Persons legislation creates criminal accountability. These are not ornamental commitments.

They represent a deliberate decision, encoded in law, that this country will not permit the conditions of the past to reassert themselves in modern form. The question this scandal poses is simple and devastating: does the government of Guyana actually mean it?

WHAT ACCOUNTABILITY LOOKS LIKE
The steps required are not complex. They are merely politically inconvenient for those who might prefer this to disappear.

First, the investigation must culminate in prosecutorial decisions — not administrative findings. Passport confiscation is a criminal offence under Guyanese law. If the evidence, which includes workers’ own testimony and appears to be uncontested on the basic facts, confirms that documents were seized, charges must be laid. A finding that passports were “subsequently returned following ministerial intervention” is not a resolution. It is a description of a crime followed by its reversal. The commission of the crime requires its own response.

Second, all outstanding wages must be paid in full before any worker is repatriated, and EKAA HRIM must bear the full cost of repatriation for all thirty-eight workers and for the remains of Sekhar Chhetri. The family of the deceased must receive compensation. The worker who lost his fingers must receive compensation. These are not demands — they are the minimum obligations of a company that benefited from their labour while violating their rights.

Third, Guyana must establish mandatory, unannounced inspection regimes for all worksites employing foreign nationals in remote locations. The conditions at Batavia did not emerge overnight. They were built over months and years, in a location specifically chosen because its remoteness discouraged oversight. Any regulatory framework that cannot reach Batavia is not a regulatory framework — it is a suggestion.

Fourth, Parliament must be asked to account for how this was allowed to happen. The Labour Ministry’s failure to inspect, intervene, or act raises questions that deserve a formal record. A parliamentary inquiry into the ministry’s oversight of foreign worker employment in extractive industries is not political theatre. It is the legitimate exercise of democratic accountability.

Finally, the government must publicly address the question every Guyanese citizen is asking: what is the precise nature of the relationship between the President’s commissioning of this facility and the company’s subsequent operating environment? The appearance of protection is as damaging as protection itself. Silence on this question will be read as confirmation.

THE COST OF LOOKING AWAY
Guyana stands at a juncture that its oil boom has made both more consequential and more fragile than at any previous moment in its modern history. The decisions made in the coming weeks — whether charges are laid, whether workers are fully compensated, whether the investigation produces accountability or a press release — will be read not just by Guyanese citizens but by the international community that is watching this country’s governance with close, calibrated attention.

A country that cannot protect thirty-eight workers from an employer who seized their documents, denied their wages, exposed them to unsafe conditions, and returned one of them home in a coffin, has not earned the right to speak about development, transformation, and the promise of oil prosperity. Not because those things are false, but because prosperity built on the silence of the exploited is not development. It is extraction with better branding.
Sekhar Chhetri’s death must not become a footnote. His colleagues’ demands must not become a diplomatic inconvenience to be managed quietly into irrelevance.

The illegal contracts, the stolen passports, the withheld wages, the missing payslips, the amputated fingers, and the body in the quarry — these are not separate incidents. They are the documented output of a system that was permitted to operate because the political geometry around it made intervention uncomfortable.
That geometry must now be overridden by the demands of law, justice, and the reputation of a nation that has survived too much history to allow itself to repeat the worst of it.

The world is watching. More importantly, Guyana’s own people are watching — and they will remember not just what happened at Batavia, but what their government chose to do about it.

The 592 Guardian is an independent Guyanese commentary platform committed to accountability journalism and civic engagement.