A REPORT published in The New Nation on Saturday indicated that training centres, mostly located in Savar and Gazipur that are meant to build skilled manpower to fulfil the needs of ‘global manpower market’ (and the cross border movement of labour) have been swindling scores of aspiring trainees of lakhs of taka evading the eyes of the law.
Bangladesh exports manpower to Singapore, UAE, South Korea, Japan, Australia, EU countries, Canada and the USA amongst many others. The expatriate Bangladeshis earn some US$14 billion per year which they remit home that constitute the core component of the country’s Foreign Exchange Reserve. The report detailed out how these centres are exploiting the intending trainees, mostly youths, and illegally taking money from people in the pretext of sending them abroad for work.
According to the report, centres like Gazipur Technical Training Centre, YMCA Training Centre, Nova Singapore Skill Training Centre, Reaz Overseas Technical Training Centre etc. are supposed to provide practical training for about 25 items, including metal framework, steel fixture, steel, reinforcement, tiles fitting and plastering, brick-laying, pipe-fitting, structural steel-fitting work, house electric work and A/C duet fabrication work.
But in reality, they earn no marketable skill to get a job even at home, not to say of the foreign labour market. These so-called skills training centres exploit the prospecting trainees financially charging inflated fees and also cheat them on any pretext.
The tragedy is that these cheating centres could hardly make the trainees a job-worthy person with suitable skills needed for the job having demand in the job-market. Moreover, they are of no help in finding out a job in the ex-Bangladesh market.
The fact of fraudulent cheating is evident in the fact that these centres take away the trainees’ passports before the exam and refuse to give them back without payment of an additional money often in lakhs. Thousands of naive and hopeful youths are brainwashed into thinking that this ‘training’ is legitimate but in truth the centres mainly use the youths as profit-making pawns.
Cheating and stealing have become common in every field of our national life. Our political leaders are the worst examples. The young ones need jobs desperately. The government has no worry about the need of creating jobs. But they expect the young ones to find jobs elsewhere. They are being cheated and exploited because jobs are not available within the country. It sounds unkind but the government is happy with foreign exchange, it earns through slave trade. The government has responsibility for creating jobs to stop slave trade.
