The United Arab Emirates (UAE) government has announced to build training centers in India for workers who want to work in the Gulf state's construction industry, in an attempt to control the inflow of unskilled workers, Gulf News reported Tuesday.

The centers will train the applicants and teach them about safety standards in the UAE construction industry as well as about rules of behavior in an Islamic country.

Gulf News quoted Saeed Abdullah, manager for National Productivity Improvement of the UAE's Federal Demographic Council (FDC), as saying that the ratio of unskilled workers in the UAE's construction sector currently stands at 85 percent.

The UAE is one of the countries with a high level of dependence on workers from abroad, according to Dr. Nasser Saidi, chief economist of the Dubai International Financial Center (DIFC) Authority. "Within the Gulf Arab region, the UAE has the largest share of the 1 trillion U.S. dollars worth of construction projects to be completed by 2020 -- at 636 billion U.S. dollars," Dr. Saidi wrote in his weekly economic commentary which was published Monday.

Around 80 percent of the UAE's 8.5 million residents are foreigners, with Indians and Pakistanis standing for half of the foreign population.

Abdullah said that until the year 2015 the UAE plans to offer jobs to 50,000 skilled blue-collar workers who successfully went through the training program.

According to the Gulf News report, the workers have to pay the training program's fees, which amount to around 1,600 U.S. dollars. By establishing training centers in India, the UAE also wants to fight illegal immigration from the sub-continent and recruitment agencies which take advantage of employment opportunities in the Gulf Arab region and overcharge poor workers.