Against the background of the release of an investigative report on the horrific working and living conditions of Nepali migrant workers in Qatar by the British newspaper The Guardian and following increasing media coverage on the issue in Nepal, the election government has announced that a ‘high level’ delegation would be sent to Middle East to finding out the reality.
Such news may be attractive for government officials, especially those associated with Ministries of Labor and Foreign Affairs, as they will have added opportunities to enjoy foreign trips. But such visits would hardly be productive. The reasons for this are simple.[break]
There is no dearth of information about how our workers in the destination countries, including those in Southeast Asia and East Asia, have been exploited, not only by their employers but also by their own countrymen who work as brokers in those countries. This writer, during his service in the government, has been witness to hundreds of cases of fraud engineered by smart-looking manpower agency people, whose only motto is to be able to dispatch the maximum number of Nepali migrant workers abroad.
Nevertheless, we have to admit that the Nepali economy is basically remittance-driven and in absence of foreign employment windfall, the country will almost starve. The government claims that Nepal is close to achieving Millennium Development Goals, especially in bringing down poverty. However, millions of our fellow countrymen are still forced to work day and night, often without food, just to make their ends meet.
Looking at the high rise buildings that are fast cropping up in urban areas like Kathmandu, we may be deluded into believing that our standard of living has gone up remarkably. More and more department stores are opening up and more and more new cars plying the dilapidated roads of Kathmandu. But does this establish the fact that Nepali people are becoming richer? Maybe a handful of businessmen like Binod Choudhury and a few corrupt politicians and government officials
have amassed plenty of wealth, but most of the people have been left behind in the wealth race, leading to widening of the gap between the haves and have-nots.
One may visit rural areas to find how our young population is disappearing from the villages in search of foreign employment. The majority of those looking to leave the country hail from poor families. They are forced to take out loans at exorbitant rates of interest. The monopoly given to manpower agencies in fixing the rates for migrant workers with no accountability to what they are doing has made young workers’ lives horrible.
Manpower agencies-induced problems become government headache. Unwisely, the government concentrates only on addressing the problems in destination countries without paying any attention to home-grown hassles like misinformation of the workers about the exact nature of their work and other conditions and facilities. One of the most serious causes for depression among our workers, many of whom die prematurely (around 400 coffins arrive in Nepal from the Gulf every year), is the vast difference between what they were made to believe they could get in pay and facilities and the harsh reality on the ground.
This scribe has been a regular visitor to a village in Parbat in connection with his volunteer work at his alma mater (Bhawani Vidyapeeth Higher Secondary School) and has thus been surprised to see girl students outnumber boys both in school and +2 levels. This skewed demography is not the result of preference of daughters over boys on the part of parents, which would have been considered welcome, but because boys tend to look for job vacancy notifications in foreign countries as soon as they pass SLC or plus two examination.
Our government’s reaction to problems of migrant workers has been simply to listen to their grievances when our ministers pass through the Middle East while visiting New York or other European cities or to dispatch delegations in the name of handling labor problems. The end result is the status quo. Neither does the government intervene with labor receiving countries in order to meet the demands of Nepali workers, nor does it do anything substantive in managing manpower agencies.
The real solution to labor problems lies in dealing with the governments of receiving countries through bilateral labor agreements and actively implementing such agreements. Moreover, the manpower agencies should be made more accountable to the people and the country.
The need of the hour is not to add to financial hardships of poor taxpayers by sending expensive delegations abroad, but to seriously go over the recommendations suggested by relevant ambassadors and implement them honestly. If a new policy is needed to effectively deal with labor problems, the interim constitution can surely be amended for one more time (it has already been amended for far less important reasons). Doing nothing on this front right now would be akin to shedding tears over the heartrending plight of the laborers whose hard-earned remittance prevents our economy from collapsing.
The author was Foreign Relations Advisor of former Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal in 2008-09
thapahira16@gmail.com
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