Reintegrating returnee migrant workers

That migrant workers after years of hard labour abroad have to face difficulty reintegrating into society after returning home is, sadly, a cruel irony. For it is to be better off financially that those people go abroad, but often find themselves without the means to settle down comfortably after return. And the reason is what they earn from usually low-paid jobs is not enough to repay the loans they made to meet expenses like agency and visa fees, travel costs and so on. And in case they have to return home due to job-loss, it is a double whammy for them. Obviously, rehabilitation of those returnee migrant workers (RMWs) with dignity in society is a high priority issue before the government. But how many of those migrant workers return home annually, the government has no record in its hands. However, according to some reports, annually, between 0.7 and 0.8 million migrant workers go abroad. Migrant rights activists, on this score, say that around 50,000 of the migrant workers return home annually. In that case, it can be assumed that over the years a large portion of the RMWs have been struggling to reintegrate into society.
And to help rehabilitate these returnees, some efforts like training or income-generating projects that are in place lack coordination and synergy. The good news is, to overcome this lacuna, the government is learnt to have prepared a draft reintegration policy with provisions that include creation of a database, establishing one-stop centres, setting up a referral mechanism for their employment and various other services for the RMWs. This is no doubt a commendable move made by the government. But one needs also to keep in mind that just adoption of a policy is not enough to help resettle the intended beneficiaries. For there is already a plethora of programmes in existent for the RMWs. But the problem is, in most cases the targeted recipients are either not aware of the services or they cannot duly access those. So, it is important to remove the barriers to service delivery which are often bureaucratic in nature. Seeing that the would-be recipients of the services generally belong to the group of unskilled workers with little literacy, they avoid getting into the complicated process of accessing those services.
In this connection, reference may be made here of the state-owned bank, the so-called Probshi Kalyan Bank (PKB), whose services include providing collateral-free credits to rehabilitate the RMWs. But as reports go, the bank is grappling with the problem of getting the right kind of beneficiaries to obtain the loans designed to help initiate income-generating activities (IGAs) for the RMWs. And that is mainly due to the absence of a data bank on the RMWs that could provide the loan officials with the required information about the nature of work the loan applicants were engaged in abroad and choose the appropriate IGAs for them. Small wonder that many of the IGAs so far financed by the rehab loans failed leading to the recipients becoming loan defaulters. On the other hand, a majority of the RMWs simply avoid availing themselves of PKB's loan service due to the complexities involved in processing the loans.
Against this backdrop, it sounds good that the draft policy for the welfare of the RMWs include provisions for services that are decentralised, one-stop, need-based, gender-diverse and so on. Hopefully, once it is finalised through the due process of law, the policy for social reintegration of the returnee migrant workers (RMWs) would be free from the usual impediments so it may deliver the intended goods.