26 Indian workers suicide in Bahrain this year

The labourers have been slapped with fines of up to $1,600 as they struggled to juggle both their daily jobs and side jobs to make a living.

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Pasupathi Mariappan, 33, originally from Tamil Nadu in South India, became the twenty-sixth Indian expat to commit suicide in Bahrain this year, according to the International Business Times.

The blacksmith who worked at Manama-based construction giant Nass Contracting Company, a subsidiary of the Nass Corporation, a Bahraini company, was found by police three days after he hung himself with a rope from a palm tree in a public garden in Hamad town last month.

More than 100 Indian workers at Nass Corporation have been prevented from returning home by an unresolved travel ban imposed on them in 2006 over a wage dispute.

"He [Mariappan] was one of many workers stranded in Bahrain after the Nass Group imposed a travel ban on them in 2006," said a spokesman for the Indian Embassy, which has received complaints from 128 Nass employees.

The workers say that they had to take extra jobs to make ends meet because they were paid just $119 a month rather than the promised $265.

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Nass also lodged a grievance against them for not showing up at work, and a court then ordered the employees to pay fines ranging from $1,061 to $1,591 for heaping losses on the firm by violating their contracts.

Disgruntled, many of the workers left the company and only realized that they were impeded by a travel ban when they attempted to leave Bahrain in 2010, during an amnesty for illegal workers.