Editorial

Migration to countries of the Gulf and East Asia has caused a major impact on Nepal’s social fabric. Every day 1,500 job seekers fly abroad for employment and annual remittances amount to around 23 percent of the GDP. This makes Nepal one of the top five remittance-receiving countries in terms of remittance to GDP ratio. Unsurprisingly, there has been much talk in the media about migrant labour over the years. There has been a great deal of focus on the suffering and hardships that labourers have to face, especially in exploitative countries in the Gulf. It is also well known that many manpower agencies within Nepal exploit labourers who seek to go abroad. Despite all the information that is available and the usual calls to the state to try and improve the situation of migrant workers, there has been very little movement in this direction.

One of the most glaring lapses is that, although the government has allowed workers to seek employment in 108 countries, it has signed labour agreements with only four of them. Many countries in the Gulf don’t even have Nepali embassies, and the ones that do are woefully under-equipped to handle the grievances of migrant workers. When there are embassies, they do not have a labour attaché to deal with migrant issues. As a result, many Nepali workers find themselves helpless when their contracts are violated by their employers or when they are abused in other ways. In recent days, the government has taken a number of steps in an attempt to prevent abuses. It has made it mandatory for workers to get trained in some skills or languages before going abroad. Doubtless, such trainings have helped many migrant workers. What is worrisome, however, is the various licenses that labourers are now required to receive before they fly abroad. Given the state of the Nepali bureaucracy, many workers perceive this step as simply a difficult and unnecessary hurdle they need to cross before they are allowed to work abroad. Then, of course, there is the familiar case of the ban on women working as domestics in a number of countries. This has not solved the problem, but placed women seeking employment abroad in a more precarious position. Many of them, instead of staying at home, now prefer to evade legal channels and find work in other countries illegally.

It is not easy to immediately rectify the system that governs migrant labour. It is, however, necessary to realise that it is deeply flawed and piecemeal solutions are not going to resolve the problems. A thorough review and overhaul of the system is necessary and, given the importance of remittance to Nepali livelihoods, this is a matter that the state needs to consider with utmost gravity.

Published on: 20 December 2012 | The Kathmandu Post