JS body asks BAIRA to cut workers' overseas recruitment cost

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A parliamentary panel Sunday asked BAIRA, the apex body of recruiting agencies, to come up with plans for reducing the high-rated migration cost from its maximum limit and fixing a minimum scale of salary for Bangladeshi overseas job seekers, reports UNB.
The lawmakers also advised the Bangladesh Association of International Recruiting Agencies (BAIRA) to submit report of recommendation for checking cheating, VISA faking and harassment facing the outbound workers by the first week of October next.
The directives came from a meeting of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Expatriate Welfare and Overseas Employment Ministry, against the backdrop of a lot of complaints about fraud and fleecing of the job-seekers, many of whom have to sell off all their land and property to pay the migration cost and, in some cases, end up getting deceived.
Briefing newsmen at the Jatiya Sangsad Media Centre after the committee meeting, its chairman Anisul Islam Mahmud said the committee stressed reorganizing the Expatriate Welfare and Overseas Employment Ministry and sought overall report from the Ministry in next three months.
The committee also made a number of other recommendations, like reducing the number of pages of passport to 16 to 17 (now about 49 pages) for the overseas workers and reducing the cost of health screening from Tk 2,500 and Dhaka-Saudi Arabia air fair as all of these measures would minimize the migration cost borne by the labour force.
The lawmakers suggested keeping the migration cost limited to Tk 0.1 million.
Committee members Expatriate Welfare and Overseas Employment Minister Khandaker Mosharraf Hossain, M Ishaq Hossain Talukder, M Shahabuddin, Col (retd) AA Maruf Saklan, Mostaq Ahmed Ruhi, Zafrul Islam Chowdhury and Shahida Tarekh Dipti attended the meeting chaired by Anisul Islam Mahmud.
The meeting directed the recruiting agencies to take initiative for exporting manpower to Romania in line with the receipt of letter of demand from the employers.