BB awards for top remitters

Among all major sources of foreign exchange earning by the country, money remitted by the expatriate Bangladeshis is considered to be the easiest and most ensured one. The remittance earning has been posting a healthy growth for many years barring a lacklustre performance for the last couple of years or so. Export of primary and manufactured commodities does fetch the highest amount of foreign exchange for the country. But manufactured commodities that bring in more than 95 per cent of the export revenue necessitate substantial spending on the import of raw materials. In the case of manpower export such expenditure is highly negligible if compared to the annual inflow of funds on this account.

Policymakers do very often acknowledge with gratitude the valuable contributions being made by the expatriate Bangladeshis in the form of remittance.  No institution knows better than the Bangladesh Bank, which handles the country's forex reserve, the real worth of remittance money. So, the act of honouring a few top remitters and buyers of US dollar investment bonds by the central bank at a function held in Dhaka Sunday last with awards seems quite befitting. The central bankers heartily praised the remitters. Undeniably, they deserved the accolade.

The award winning remitters highlighted a few important issues to encourage greater inflow of remittance through legal channels and its productive investment. They wanted an exclusive economic zone for the non-resident Bangladeshis (NRBs), extension of one-stop service centres under the umbrella of the Board of Investment (BoI) to district headquarters and narrowing down of the gap between the official exchange rate and that prevailed in the curb market. By any count all these are useful suggestions that deserve proper scrutiny by the appropriate policymakers.

But while recognizing the contributions of the large remitters, the policymakers must not forget those expatriate Bangladeshis who earn small wages at the cost of their sweat and blood. In fact, the funds these workers send constitute the bulk of remittance earning by the country. Maybe the sizeable part of the money remitted by them is used for consumption purposes, but that does not anyway reduce the importance of the same in the context of the country's balance of payments (BoP) situation. The conditions in which these workers live in many Gulf countries, Singapore and Malaysia are purely subhuman.

And those who are staying illegally remain in constant fear of being caught by the law enforcers. The sufferings that the Bangladeshi workers wanting to make an unauthorized entry into a country usually endure are known widely courtesy of the media. The funds transferred by both legal and illegal migrant workers back home bring smiles to the faces of their near and dear ones and also the central bank honchos. But one has reasons to be shocked to see how these poor workers are subjected to harassment at the Bangladesh airport and maltreated by the crew of the national airliner while on board. Besides, nothing tangible has been done yet for the welfare of the expatriate workers and their families back home. So, medals would not mean much to Bangladeshis earning small wages abroad. There should be some other practical ways of recognising their contribution to the national economy.