Mashiur Rahaman

Squeezing of employment opportunity for the non-resident Bangladeshis abroad sees no immediate sign of recovery, as the outbound workers' flow dropped by 24 per cent in June against January 2009.

This is a comparison between the two periods of the global recession that has hit hard the manpower export sector, which earns the highest foreign exchange for the country, an official of Bureau of Manpower Employment and Training (BMET) told the FE.

According to him, January 2009 is the month when this sector first started to feel the pinch of the financial meltdown. Now, after six months, the present status clearly reflects how the sector is striving, the BMET officer explained.

"This is what the experts had been warning of, and the worst is yet to come, as all the government efforts to explore new destinations abroad seem to be going in vain," he said.

According to the monthly overseas employment database of BMET, some 38,568 people have found jobs abroad in June, a downfall from 50,632 of January.

The country's top remittance earning sector showed another 60 per cent drop in the first six months (Jan-June 2009) of this year against the same period of the previous year (Jan-June 2008). Besides, in terms of month-to-month (June '08 against June '09) comparison, June 2009 witnessed a 47 per cent fall, the BMET database showed.

According to the BMET official, there is no sign of improvement regarding fresh recruitments of the Bangladeshi workers in the major job markets. On the other hand, the export-oriented economies of the South-east Asian countries are still striving because of the aftermath of the global economic slowdown. This has brought our manpower export to those countries to near halt, he added.

"This is the bitter truth that we were trying to make the government realise," president of Bangladesh Association of International Recruiting Agencies (BAIRA) Golam Mustafa told the FE.

He said the government kept on neglecting the significance of this falling number of overseas employment, claiming that the sector would manage to escape the onslaught of global recession. But the data has revealed the truth, proving that the situation is even worsening every month.

"World economy experienced the total blitz of recession by January this year, as is witnessed in the country's manpower export. But our overseas employment scenario has been gradually deteriorating even from that bottom line. This is an ominous forecast of what this sector is likely to experience in the upcoming days," the BAIRA president added.

Expressing his disappointment over the government's initiatives in helping the sector recover Mustafa said they have done nothing new.

"The government has hardly offered any support to the manpower sector during the past years in the time of needs. But we had expected something different this time, but ultimately ended up with disappointment again," he added.

The government has also neglected our appeal to allocate fund in the budget to support the returnee migrants during recession, he said.

"This is a bleak situation, and the future of the sector is largely depending on the government's future initiatives. However, we are still optimistic, as the government assured us that they are taking care of the issue," the BAIRA president added.