ECR and ECNR
Decades back, when travelling abroad, I remember my passport had an ECNR label on it. It stood for Emigration Clearance Not Required. I never bothered to find out about it back then, and only recently stumbled upon an article that explained what it was all about. In India, people who haven’t completed schooling until 10 th standard were issued an ECR (Emigration Clearance Required) passport. When men with such passports want to travel abroad (18 countries on that list) for employment, they needed to get an “Emigration Clearance” from the Protector of Emigrants department. For women holding such ECR passports, it was worse – if under the age of 30, they could not go for work to those countries at all. This sounds outrageous and discriminatory, so why was such a policy even created? Pranay Kotasthane says the reason was actually a good one: “This system was adopted to prevent the exploitation of uneducated and, hence, vulnerable Indians. The logic was that this a...