Expat ministry agrees on manpower proposal

The expatriate welfare ministry yesterday agreed in principle to a set of proposals of two research organisations that asked the government to strengthen the manpower of the ministry to cope with new challenges.
The Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD) and Refugee and Migratory Movement Research Unit (RMMRU), the research organisations, proposed the ministry increase the number of its joint secretaries and introduce cadre service.
They submitted the proposals at a meeting of the parliamentary standing committee on the expatriate welfare and overseas employment ministry held in the parliament building.
The minister, Khandaker Mosharraf Hossain, and other government officials were present at the meeting.
“The ministry is now running on the same strength of manpower as it had when Bangladesh's remittance earning was $2 billion a year. Now the earning reached $11 billion, but the manpower of the ministry remains the same,” Anisul Islam Mahmud, chief of the parliamentary body, told this correspondent after the meeting.
So, the research organisations placed the proposal of increasing the number of joint secretaries to five and allocating more fund for the ministry, said Mahmud.
The CPD and RMMRU also asked the ministry to include the issue of migrant workers in the next five-year plan of the government, the committee chief said.
“The committee as well as the minister agreed with the proposals. The minister gave assurance of implementing those in phases,” Mahmud said.
“We asked the ministry to recruit quality officials for the ministry so that they can deliver better services to the migrant workers,” said Prof CR Abrar, executive director of RMMRU.
The research organisations also urged the ministry to go for public-private partnership for providing training to the prospective migrant workers as what experts of the two organisations said proper and qualitative training is vital for getting good jobs abroad.
Prof Mustafizur Rahman, executive director of the CPD, said they have called upon the ministry to be engaged actively with the dialogue of the Mode-4 of General Agreement on Trade in Services under which developed countries are likely to import both skilled and unskilled workers from developing nations.