With nearly one and a half million Bangladeshi workers working abroad and providing a lifeline to the Bangladesh economy by sending back much-needed foreign exchange earnings, it is heartening to learn that steps have been undertaken to make their lives easier. It is understood that from November onwards, migrant workers will be able to get immigration clearance from district manpower offices. This is being made possible as the authorities are going to decentralise this service. Hence, it will definitely lessen a lot of hassle for workers who hitherto had to travel to the capital city to obtain immigration clearance, which was both time consuming and expensive.
Immigration clearance is a mandatory process that workers have to go through while going abroad with a work visa. At present, this service is provided at the head office of the Bureau of Manpower Employment and Training (BMET) in Dhaka. It makes sense to decentralise this service since migrant workers come from different districts of the country and making available this service at field offices in the districts cuts down on their time and also reduces the work load of the BMET head office.
Of course, this will not be a blanket service for expatriate workers headed to any foreign destination. Rather, it is hoped to roll out the service for those countries which already have in place, established online visa services and lower risks of forgery. The aim is to introduce the immigration clearance from the district-level employment and manpower offices and gradually work towards making possible 85 per cent of the clearances to be handled by these offices in the field. From what has been planned, issuing clearance will target primarily the labour markets in the Middle East, which according to officials, experience fewer instances of visa forgery.
Currently, BMET operates some 42 district offices and it will be interesting to see how the programme is rolled out. Naturally, it is not possible to predict the success of the decentralisation move before its operationalisation. There could be hiccups but the fact that authorities have taken the first step in, what is essentially a right one, the problems should be mitigated with time. According to a report published in this newspaper, those districts that will offer these services include Gazipur, Narayanganj, Sherpur, Madaripur, Shariatpur, Bagerhat, Magura, Jhalkhathi, Thakurgaon, Kurigram, Lalmonirhat, Nilphamari, Naogaon, Natore, Lakshmipur, Brahmanbaria, Habiganj, Sunamganj, Pirojpur, Narail, Meherpur and Rajbari.
These offices will begin under the aegis of technical training centres and as capacity builds, branch out into separate offices in 2024. The information that has been shared states that skilled workers will be benefited as they will have the option to obtain immigration clearance online. As for the rest, the unskilled or semi-skilled workers will need to physically visit their respective manpower recruiting agencies to obtain the necessary immigration clearances. But the fact that no worker will have to waste precious time and resources to travel to the capital city to obtain this essential documentation is in itself a boon. As physical smart cards will be phased out in favour of online smart cards, the possibility of tampering data is lessened and all workers will be able to download and print their cards anywhere in the country. It certainly will provide much better security in terms of data integrity and streamline operations that will be beneficial for both workers and employers.
