Staff Reporter :
Amid the government’s persistent struggle to keep the forex reserves healthy, the migrant workers sent remittance of $2.09 billion in July in the first month of the fiscal 2022-23.
This flow of remittance is about 11 per cent higher compared with corresponding month of the last FY 2021-2022 when migrant workers across the world sent $1.87 billion, Bangladesh Bank (BB) said in its updated report on Monday.
Officials of the central bank said, the government has taken a number of policies to encourage migrant workers to send their earned money through legal channels to avoid any kind of hassles and harassments.
As a result, the migrants are sending more money than other times and it has made a record in the first month of the current fiscal, they said.
BB is hopeful that this upward trend of remittance inflow will continue in the upcoming days.
The surge in remittance inflow has been augmented largely because of the Eid festival, BB said.
Source said that remittance inflow is expected to increase in the coming months because some 8.77 lakh people went abroad for work in the first 11 months of the last fiscal year.
With the rapid depletion of the foreign reserves, the value of taka against the US dollar has fallen at a faster speed and the exchange rate of the dollar rose as high as Tk112 last week.
Last week, country’s forex reserves stood at $39.67 billion, in contrast to $46.15 billion in December last year.
According to BB, $330 million remittance inflow in July channelled to Bangladesh through state-run commercial banks, $32.42 million through state-run specialised banks, $1.78 billion through private banks, and $6.64 million through foreign banks.
Sources said that Bangladesh has been experiencing economic meltdown due to overburdening mega projects and the volatile global situation created out of the Ukraine-Russia war.
Now the government has taken various anteriority measures to plug the dollar crisis in a bid to save the foreign reserve.
The government has discouraged import of luxury items, taken go-slow policy to implement various ongoing projects, undertaken measures to save energy.
