The United Arab Emirates is gearing up to slash its large labour-intensive workforce and to rely on technology and highly skilled manpower in the years ahead, Speaker of UAE's Federal National Council (FNC) Abdul Aziz Al-Ghurair said on Sunday.
Briefing reporters from around the world to participate in the Emirates National Day, he said that the UAE parliament - FNC - has constituted a Federal Demographics Council to look into the issue of the large expat population.
"We are a minority in our own country," Ghurair said and added, "With a large expat population it is very easy to lose your identity."
"It is important that we maintain our own national identity," he told that the media representatives from around 46 countries here at the Emirates Centre for Strategic Studies and Research. He said that the objective of setting up the council was to study the demographics of UAE, that is home to around 180 nationalities and is skewed heavily in favour of its expatriate community.
A recent study puts the local Emirati population at around 1.65 million of the around 6 million total population. It includes a heavy presence of 1.75 million Indians, 1.25 million Pakistanis and around 0.5 million Bangladeshis, besides another 0.5 million from China, the Philippines, Thailand, Korea, Afghanistan and Iran.
Expats from West account for around 0.5 million mostly from European Union, Australia, Africa and America. Over the years, increasing expat population has been a cause of concern in the Emirates, triggering frequent debates in its parliament and leading to the setting up of the Demographics Council that will be headed by the Deputy Prime Minister Lieutenant General Shaikh Saif bin Zayed Al-Nahyan and the Minister for Interior.
The council aims at striking a balance in the demographic structure of the country and will seek fewer labour forces by relying more on advanced construction techniques, besides allowing the expat students to work part-time.
The Speaker of the FNC said his country has an open and progressive society, but would still like to preserve its identity. "It is nice to be able to talk in other languages, but you also need to be able to speak your own," he said when asked whether the parliament was stressing use of Arabic language in schools.
He said the UAE was the only federation in the Arab world and was progressing towards democracy gradually. He said at present there were no political parties. "The objective is that the members of the parliament work for national interest and have no allegiance to any party."
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