Lekhanath Pandey

The government seems to have learnt lessons from the difficulties it faced while rescuing Nepalis from restive Libya and disasters-struck northeastern coast of Japan for want of reliable data.

Yesterday, Chief Secretary Madhav Prasad Ghimire called Foreign Secretary Dr Madan Kumar Bhattarai and Labour Secretary Dinesh Hari Adhikari, among others, at his office and directed them to prepare a database of Nepali migrant workers immediately.

“During rescue efforts in Libya, we spent a lot of time locating our people,” said an official of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MoFA), who attended yesterday’s meeting. “We faced a similar ordeal in Japan.”

The meeting formed a taskforce for database preparation with MoFA Joint-Secretary Dhananjaya Jha and Purna Chandra Bhattarai, Joint Secretary of the Ministry of Labour and Transport Management (MoLTM), as members.

Executive Director of the Foreign Employment Promotion Board (FEPB) Sthaneshwor Devkota admitted neither government nor outsourcing agencies have complete and credible statistics on the Nepalis working in the Gulf. “With half the migrant workers undocumented, we are finding it hard to compile their data,” said Devkota. Women working in the Gulf are mostly undocumented, as most of them fly to the region as domestic workers through illegal channels. The official channel is MoLTM and Department of Foreign Employment Department (DoFE). DoFE has record of only 23,000 women of 2,00,000 believed to be working in the Gulf.

The government is monitoring Nepalis working in Gulf countries amid protests in Bahrain, Oman and Saudi Arabia. With martial law imposed in Bahrain, migrant workers’ troubles have increased.

Foreign Secretary Bhattarai said the taskforce will collect details of the Nepalis and store it in a website. “The record will be helpful in rescuing migrant workers during emergencies,” said Dr Bhattarai.

Published on: 3 March 2011 | The Himalayan Times