The delay in deputing new officials has inconvenienced some 600,000 Nepali migrant workers in Saudi Arabia . The understaffed Nepali mission in the country is unable to cope with the workload created by the recently announced amnesty plan for illegal migrant workers.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MoFA) has deputed seven staffers to the mission led by Udaya Raj Pandey. Despite some other labour attachés and local staffers, the mission that oversees five neighbouring countries as well, has not been able to clear pending tasks.

“The existing workforce is insufficient even to handle normal workload. We have long been asking the foreign ministry to add two non-gazetted officers,” said Pandey, Nepal’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia . “All we have been receiving is commitment. The government must deploy additional officials to address the crisis.”

Officials in Kathmandu say they are deputing four new staffers to the Saudi Arabia mission “very soon”. MoFA and the Ministry of Labour and Employment are planning to send two staffers each to the Riyadh mission within a few days. The deputation, however, will be temporary and the staffers will be recalled once their assignments are over.

“The MoFA should depute two more staffers permanently to enable us to handle day-to-day affairs efficiently,” said Pandey.

Besides unforeseen circumstances like the amnesty plan, the embassy takes up a wide range of issues such as visa issuance, demand attestation, passport issuance and legal assistance and repatriation in case of dead and imprisoned workers. Since handwritten passports will be invalid on November 15, 2015, as per the deadline set by the International Civil Aviation Organisation, hordes of workers are in queue for machine readable passports.

The scarcity of personnel and physical facilities is a common problem faced by embassies in the Gulf and Malaysia.  MoFA has allocated a total of 28 staffers in its missions in Qatar, the UAE, Kuwait and Malaysia, which have in total an estimated 2.5 million Nepali migrant workers.

Published on: 3 June 2013 | The Kathmandu Post