The number has been declining after Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MoFA) put a limit on issuance of passports after Nepal missed the April 1 deadline to issue Machine-readable Passport (MRP) at the call of International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO). [break]
Officials at the Department of Foreign Employment (DoFE) said the number of passports submitted for final approvals has dropped to 1,000 per day from 1,400 per day when there was no limit for passport issuance.
MoFA has been issuing only about 1,000 passports a day, down from about 3,000 passports distributed every day before April 1. Earlier, the government used to issue passports through district administration offices of concerned districts.
“We are receiving around 800 to 1,000s passports a day from manpower agencies for final approvals for foreign jobs. Final approvals for foreign jobs are declining as youths are not getting passport easily after April 1,” said an official keeping record of final approvals at DoFE.
Mohan Krishna Sapkota, director general of DoFE, said that limit on issuance of passports would make serious impacts on demands and supplies of Nepali workers in labor destinations.
Manpower agencies said only around 20,000 aspiring youths are getting passports every month, which is far lower than the monthly demands placed by the labor destinations.
“We are receiving demands for about 60,000 workers every month. We are failing to send workers to labor destinations on time due to limit in passport distribution,” Kumud Khanal, general secretary of Nepal Association of Foreign Employment Agencies (NAFEA), told myrepublica.com on Monday.
Khanal, who is also the managing director of Fusion International, further added that his agency managed to send only 50 workers for an overseas employer company that had placed demand for 250 workers.
“We have been failing to win the confidence of overseas employers due to failure in sending workers on time,” Khanal said, adding, “Not only ours, other manpower agencies are also facing the same problem due to limit in passport issuance despite high demands in overseas destinations.”
Manpower agencies said this would make serious impact in the long run as overseas employers are gradually shifting to other sending countries.
“The number of workers leaving for foreign jobs would have been far higher had there been no problem in issuing passport,” Khanal added.
According to DoFE, a total of 231,934 workers left for foreign jobs in the first 10 months of current fiscal year, up 24 percent from the figure recorded during the same period last year.
Govt suspends Libya
Responding to problems being faced by Nepali workers in Libya, the government has suspended granting final approval for the North African country. The government had formally opened Libya as a labor destination last year.
Sapkota said they decided to suspend granting final approval to Libya following reports about the plight of workers there. Two manpower agencies had applied to DoFE, seeking final permission to send about 400 workers to Libya.
The DoFE took the decision after Nepali mission in Cairo reported last month that 108 Nepali workers have been forced to work in miserable conditions. They have been forced to work like bonded labors and are not getting even minimum salary, a source at DoFE said.
The workers and their families have requested the government to do the needful in rescuing them. According to officials, around $141,000 is required to rescue them.
“Situation in Libya is not that worse. Most of the workers hired by other companies are getting promised salary in time,” Som Lal Bataju, president of NEFEA, said. Bataju’s agency alone has sent over 900 workers to Libya.
International Organization for Migration (IOM) has expressed its intent to support the government in rescuing 108 workers from Libya. IOM’s reaction came after the Ministry of Labor and Transport Management (MoLTM) requested its help to bring the workers home.
Meanwhile, MoLTM has given its consent to DoFE to permit one more manpower agency to send workers to Poland. MoLTM gave its nod Alliance Human Resource to send 100 women to work in agriculture farms in Poland.
prabhakar@myrepublica.com
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