KATHMANDU, April 20: The Non-Resident Nepalis Association (NRNA) has called on the government to immediately create an environment conducive for the Nepali nationals who are stranded abroad to return home in Nepal.
A delegation led by the NRNA founder president Dr Upendra Mahato demanded this in a six-point memorandum it submitted to Minister for Labour, Employment and Social Security, Rameshwor Raya Yadav, on Sunday.
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NRNA also called for distributing essentials like foodstuff to those facing shortage of food and accommodation and rehabilitate those people returning from abroad. It called on the government to create, by any means, an environment so that the Nepalis who are in dire situation abroad and urgently need to return Nepal could do so as well as to make arrangements to keep them in quarantine and self isolation once they returned home, NRNA COVID-19 High-Level Committee's press coordinator Chiran Sharma said.
The Association, likewise, urged the government to make arrangements for the distribution, in coordination with NRNA and the Nepali diplomatic mission concerned, to the non-resident Nepalis abroad who are immediately in need of support. It stated that it was also ready to contribute a certain amount in proportion to the fund that the government will put in for this purpose.
NRNA also called for making arrangements so that the foreign-returnees can avail of the counselling by a psychologist during the period they remain in isolation. It drew the government's attention that arrangements should also be made for providing information to the foreign returnee NRNs for starting new industries and enterprises.
Similarly, the NRNA memorandum calls for rehabilitating the foreign-returnee Nepalis and for bringing programmes aimed at motivating them in self-employment and employment, for collecting the details of the skills they have and setting up a skill bank for using the same in Nepal and for providing the details of this to the Nepali industrialists and business community. It also calls for making provisions for providing loans at low-interest rate to the Nepal-returnee NRNs and for creating employment opportunities for them within the country.