Wild Wild West: An insight of Pakistani students living abroad – Part 3

Tuesday, October 25th, 2011 8:46:45 by Ahmed Babar

Part 3:

Houses in London are quite smaller than what we have in our part. Most of the houses are built on around 550 square feet on average. One main reason is the cold weather; small houses help to keep it warm during the chilly winters in London.

A box room is a best choice for a student trying to control his finances and saving up for his University fee and to send some back home. Box room is a new term for most of us but as the name suggests it is a very small sized room which has one single bed and a small wardrobe. It costs around £160 per week to rent a box room adding up to a total of £ 640 per month.

We can reveal the secret hidden behind the lives of our students living abroad by doing simple maths. Working 20 hours a week as allowed to a student legally by the government of United Kingdom earns him about £ 600 per month.

Adding £ 180.50 (the monthly travel fare) in £ 640 gives us a total of £ 820.50 and we have only added the travel and the living cost. Not to forget the third most expensive thing in London is the food and if you are a student your fee plays an important part too. Then come the big London attractions.

One thing is clear from above stats that, it is quite complicated to support oneself in London especially if you have to earn and pay your own fee. There are numerous ways adopted by our fellow citizens to achieve this impossible. Students break the law and work more than 20 hours to save up for their fee along with meeting their living, travel and food expenses.

System in London is quite strong and if you work more than 20 hours which means you are breaking the law, it can be traced. Salaries are transferred straight into the bank accounts against a national insurance or NI number which is issued by the Government.

You cannot find a job unless you have been provided with the NI number. The information stored against the NI number gives details of total number of hours allowed and worked. There are loop holes in every system and when you are desperate like most of our brothers and sisters are in foreign countries they find those loop holes pretty easily.

The most common adopted way is that they manage to find a job that pays them cash and not in their bank accounts. Who provide such jobs? The answer is Pakistani employers.

Off course when you are in need you trust your own above others but it is really painful to learn that our own people take advantage of the situation.

The minimum wage that the British Government has set is £ 6.08 per hour. In order to work more than 20 hours a week our students gets ready for an amount much lesser than that. There had been cases when employers have paid as low as £ 3 an hour to their compatriots.

Tags: Australia, Box room, British Government, Canada, Electricity crisis, food crisis, Illiteracy, London, London Bridge, London Expenses, national insurance, Niagara Falls, Pakistani Student, student visa, Studying abroad, studying in London, terrorism, TFL, Times Square, United Kingdom, United States

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