Visa Checking
Doorstep facilities to cut labour trafficking
Speakers tell roundtable
The government should arrange for checking visa and related information at district level for overseas jobs to control labour trafficking, speakers said at a roundtable yesterday.
They said if the government provides overseas jobseekers with facility for visa checking at their doorsteps, the counts of trafficking would decrease a great deal.
Sudhakar Datta, deputy secretary of the expatriate welfare and overseas employment ministry, said several factors lead people to fall victim to traffickers.
Overseas jobseekers in general are not accustomed to seeking help from government officials, as brokers mislead them although arrangement is in place at every deputy commissioner's office for the jobseekers, he said.
Brokers take the advantage to cheat the jobseekers by providing them with tourist or Umrah visas, said Datta.
Akram Hussain, a trafficking victim from Mirpur, shared his experience that broker Lokman of the same area took Tk 1.5 lakh from him assuring him of sending to Dubai for three years as a barber.
In 2004, Lokman sent him with a tourist visa to Dubai where he passed a month, most of the days underfed or fasting, said the victim.
"I arranged the money at interest and am incurring interest every month. But Lokman refused to pay the money", he said, adding that Lokman only returned him Tk 20,000.
The speakers said Akram's passport even did not have any visa, but some unscrupulous immigration officers managed his trip.
Dr Kamal Uddin Ahmed, joint secretary (political) of the home ministry, said traffickers most time escape through the loopholes of law, as there is no comprehensive and consolidated law to try them.
Now provisions of around 14 different laws are necessary to try a trafficker, he said, adding that the government is preparing a comprehensive act styled "Anti-trafficking Law", which is likely to be placed in the next cabinet meeting.
Speaking as the chief guest, Ahmed said, "Apparently, we earn a good amount of foreign currencies every year...but a handsome portion of the money is siphoned off through trafficking".
Deputy Secretary Sudhakar Datta said now a total of 847 recruiting agencies are operating while over one crore people are working abroad.
Licenses of 25 recruiting agencies were canceled last year and 17 licenses this year (till May) due to irregularities, he said.
The deputy secretary added that the government has borrowed US$40 million to provide a compensation of Tk 50,000 to each returnee worker from Libya.
The roundtable titled "Ensuring safe migration and abating labour trafficking: Role of the media" was jointly organised by Brac, Winrock International, USAID, and BMSF at Brac Centre Inn in the city yesterday.
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