Arokkiaraj Heller
Stay at EEGA: October 2019 – March 2020
Research project: Indian medical students’ mobility choices to Eastern Europe and non – Eastern European countries: A comparative study
Arokkiaraj Heller is specialized in the field of international migration from India. He holds a PhD in Social Work from the University of Delhi, India (2019). He was awarded the Junior Research Fellowship (JRF) in Social Work by the University Grants Commission (UGC). He has been a part of large-scale migration surveys conducted in the states of Tamil Nadu (2015) and Kerala (2018). Further, he worked as an research intern at the India Centre for Migration (ICM) at the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), India. During his internship period at ICM, he researched on Minimum Referral Wages (MRWs) for selected occupations in the Gulf countries and other countries in the Colombo Process. Recently, he worked as a Research Associate at the Centre for Development Studies (CDS), Kerala (India) under Prof. S Irudaya Rajan. He has published his research work in journals listed in the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) like Social Policy & Administration. Very recently, he has published one of his PhD thesis chapters titled “The Consequences of Husband’s International Migration on Family Left-Behind in Tamil Nadu, India” in the Journal of International Migration and Integration (JIMI). He has also published articles in edited books like India Migration Report (2017) and in India’s Low-Skilled Migration to the Middle East: Policies, Politics and Challenges (2019). Currently, he has submitted an article titled “Profiling International Migration from Sivaganga District, Tamil Nadu” for the India Migration Report (2020).
During his stay at EEGA, he conducts empirical research on “Indian medical students’ mobility choices to Eastern Europe and non – Eastern European countries: A comparative study”. The proposed research is expected to increase the understanding of the students’ mobility to EE and Non-EE countries by exploring for the first time the experiences of Indian students pursuing medical degrees.
