A REPORT carried in a national English daily on Monday said, 33 regional passport offices could not provide a single MRP in the last six months but were spending public money to pay house rents and employees’ salaries. This is causing serious problems to people of those areas who applied for passports mainly for jobs abroad. The concerned official blamed non-cooperation of the Malaysian contractor for the prevailing situation. But nobody is bothered about the harassment faced by members of the public. Outside the country, around 5 lakh Bangladeshi workers in Malaysia are suffering incredibly due to a lack of machine-readable passports (MRP) as their conventional passports became invalid after November 24 of last year, said the report. Besides, the country is also losing remittance amounts as expatriates are facing problems with their old passports. New overseas employment has almost came to a halt as well. These are happening because the government has failed to provide MRPs as per the needs of the people.
The report said, the problem began because of the conflicts of interest between the supplier firms, Malaysian IRIS Corporation and a local consortium of Dataedge, Polish PWPW and ipeople. IRIS Corporation had been providing software solution for passports under the first MRP project since 2010. The company had set up its central system in Agargaon and they are contractually obligated to support expansion of the MRP issuance centres at home and abroad. But failing to win a bid in 2012 for a new project to expand the service for establishing new passport offices in the remaining 33 districts, it resorted to delaying tactics. It is really unthinkable that a company can violate its contractual obligations and why the government cannot take any legal actions against it yet.
Remittances are the second largest source of foreign exchange of Bangladesh. The country is likely to face a remittance shortfall this fiscal. Lower outflow of migrant workers is mainly responsible for such a declining trend in remittance inflows. Bangladesh Bank (BB) data show that expatriates remitted a total of $ 10.48 billion during the July-March period of the FY 2013-14. The same was $11.12 billion during the corresponding period of FY 2012-13.
We urge the government to ensure safe passage of migration of the expatriate workers abroad for the better interest of the economy. As passports are the first step along the way, the government should remove the obstacles towards the procurement of MRPs soon. The interests of the economy cannot be suborned so that one firm may profit. The government should form a probe body to investigate the affair. If the Malaysian company is found guilty, they must compensate the loss the country has incurred. And the government should take immediate steps to produce MRPs in amounts commensurate with their demand.
