17/08/2020
Rights watchdog comes down on government over migrant repatriation
Nepalis who cannot pay for their flights, quarantine fees and travel expenses to their hometowns are not getting any support and that they
continue to languish in foreign lands (https://kathmandupost.com/national/2020/04/16/we-don-t-want-to-die-in-this-desert-nepaliworkers-in-the-uae-plead-to-be-brought-home), the report said.
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According to the government, 50,130 Nepalis from 30 countries (https://ccmc.gov.np/pr79.html) have returned home since the lockdown was
enforced on March 24.
In May the Foreign Employment Board had estimated that over 400,000 Nepali workers were likely to return home as a result of the
pandemic and 127,000 were waiting to return immediately (https://kathmandupost.com/national/2020/05/09/thousands-of-nepalimigrant-workers-from-persian-gulf-and-malaysia-expected-to-return-home-soon). A few days after this data came out the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs, on the other hand, said that 210,871 needed to be immediately rescued.
Government authorities do not seem to have one set of data on Nepali migrant workers awaiting repatriation.
“If we calculate on the basis of the number of work permits that expire every day, then around 214,000 such permits have expired as of
Wednesday,” said Rameshwar Nepal, a labour migration researcher and the co-author of the Commission report.
“The repatriation process was delayed in the first place because the data prepared by Nepali missions and government agencies were not
reliable,” said Sudip Pathak, a member of the commission.
The knock-on effect of the disputed data was delayed repatriation, which in turn led to more and more workers losing their jobs and facing pay
cuts as the months wore on.
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“Workers were terminated and some did not get their full salaries, and they could not even exercise their rights as per the labour laws of the
host nations,” said Pathak. While the government underestimated the number of workers
(https://kathmandupost.com/national/2020/06/05/government-underestimates-number-of-workers-awaiting-repatriation-say-experts)
who needed to be rescued, the number of out-of-job migrant workers were increasing with every passing day, according to Nepal.
“Workers are still stranded abroad because the repatriation process was not expedited. Our diplomatic initiatives were not adequate to protect
Nepali workers. Life and aspirations of poor migrant workers are under threat because government policies have not helped them,” Nepal
said.
(/author/chandan-kumar-mandal)
Chandan Kumar Mandal (/author/chandan-kumar-mandal)
Chandan Kumar Mandal is the environment and migration reporter for The Kathmandu
Post, covering labour migration and governance, as well as climate change, natural
disasters, and wildlife.
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