THE number of dead bodies received at the three international airports of the country rose every year and last year, 3,375 bodies of migrant workers arrived in Bangladesh and 550 of them died of stroke and 385 of heart attack. This report came in the press. Most of these workers were below 40 and died of stroke and heart attack, which raised concerns about the unnatural deaths of migrant workers abroad.
Plight of migrant workers are enormous as they don’t have congenial working and living places, low salaries, money-transfer complications, old passports, etc. Besides, some global gangs of human traffickers allure people under false promise of lucrative jobs, even abduct innocent youths and hold them hostage to squeeze ransom from their relatives back in the country.
Although Bangladesh has a tough law against human trafficking which was adopted in 2012, but this law has been hardly enforced. Human traffickers, despite the recent boat tragedies, are still prowling in the country. It is now imperative for the government to apply the law properly to stopping human trafficking for which the country is now blamed. While the plight of migrant workers in-and-outside the country is prominent, recently the most tragic factor of unnatural deaths has been highlighted in the news media .
A report says the actual figure of deaths could be over 5,000 a year and at least 1,738 died of strokes, heart attacks, cancer and other illnesses. 30.44 percent of the deaths were in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, 16.83 percent in Malaysia and 14.46 percent in the United Arab Emirates. Experts observe Bangladeshi workers go through a lot of physical and mental sufferings due to low income, debt for costly migration and hostile workplaces, lack of medical care and a balanced diet which add cumulatively to their sufferings that even lead to death. In spite of these causes, three important factors e.g. unknown causes of deaths of 20 overseas workers, lack of available data on the dead bodies at Chittagong and Sylhet airports, different causes of migrant workers deserve proper investigations. Experts who have unveiled these concealed factors demand that postmortems be carried out in Bangladesh to ascertain the causes of the deaths.
Bangladesh is a leading manpower exporting country but our ill-fated workers who contribute so much to our foreign exchange are at the mercy of the unscrupulous manpower agents. At workplaces, they are subjected to harsh living and working conditions which wear them down mentally and physically, and thus becoming victims of early demise. Men in their physical and mental primetime face tremendous pressures which slowly kill them. As the country depends substantially on the remittances sent by its overseas workers, it is imperative for the government to become serious in addressing the plight of the hard money earners. Such unnatural deaths of the workers abroad should be taken seriously.
