HIGH sounding success stories through foreign trips have been proved to be a failure in solving the crises facing our expatriates around the world. The coming days would be more difficult as the date of providing machine readable passport (MRP) to the expatriate Bangladeshis is drawing nearer. About six million Bangladeshis working abroad are likely to be deported next year for having no passports readable by computer. An English daily on Wednesday reported, old passports would not be accepted by any foreign governments on expiry of the deadline (November 24, 2015) set by the International Civil Aviation Organisation.
Issuance of the new MRPs continues to be sluggish, as the government seems to have no power over the IRIS Corporation Berhad – the Malaysian company responsible for production of the new travel documents. IRIS seems to have gone beyond the control of the passport regulator and it can shut down the entire system if it so wishes. IRIS, whose job was only to provide software and technical documentation and print passports, now controls the entire MRP system, and it became possible by making nexus with some passport officials offering gainful benefits.
The problem started because of interest conflicts between IRIS Corporation and its competitor two years after the MRP project began in 2010. IRIS started making things difficult for the government after it lost an MRP expansion job to one of its competitors at home and another job in Malaysia. It resorted to delaying tactics breaching the contractual obligations to integrate the software of others with its system free of cost. The Malaysian company is now blocking the system with codes and shifting the blame onto its competitors. It is really unthinkable that a company can violate its contractual obligations and 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, a near 10 percent decline.
We feel strongly that the government should ensure safe 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 allowing a single firm to profit. If the IRIS is found guilty, they must compensate the loss the country has incurred. And the government should take immediate steps to produce sufficient number of MRPs which is commensurate with the demand.
