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Once the policy comes into effect, the government will not allow the workers to fly to six countries in the Middle East and Malaysia unless the employers are willing to bear the visa and ticket fees. The six destination countries include Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Oman and Kuwait.
With the rapid increase in the number of migrant workers, the manpower agencies have mushroomed in almost all the cities and towns across the country. These manpower agencies were a big help for the unskilled youths willing to go abroad for employment. Today, there is probably not a single VDC ward across the country from where the youths have not been abroad as migrant workers.
However, these manpower agencies have also earned a bad name over the years as many of them deceive the poor youths by charging exorbitant sums of money for visa and ticket fees and sending them to the wrong destinations and to companies other than the ones mentioned in the contract papers. They have even sent Nepalese workers to countries that are banned for Nepalese workers.
The excessive cheating of Nepalese workers by the manpower agencies was revealed when 12 Nepalese workers were brutally killed in Iraq by a terrorist group in September 2004. The killings resulted in violence in Kathmandu, in which the angry mobs torched almost all offices of the manpower agencies. Since then the business of the manpower agencies in Kathmandu has gone virtually underground while it grew outside the valley.
Since the Iraq incidence, there was a demand for the proper management of the manpower agencies to avoid unwanted incidents. However, it took more than a decade for the government to introduce the much-awaited policy to control the cheating, thanks to the political instability in the country.
Many Nepalese workers have suffered over the decades due to the unscrupulous manpower agencies. A few of them have committed suicide or made suicide attempts. What’s more a large number of Nepalese, who were sent abroad illegally, have been stranded in different countries or even jailed. Recently, there was a news story about Nepalese youths being stranded in a US city.