Around 50,000 Bangladeshi expatriates in Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Malaysia are anxiously waiting for their machine readable passports (MRP) even after paying the fees over a year ago. Malaysian company IRIS Corporation Berhad, which had taken data from the Bangladeshis for the passports, did not transfer all the information to the central system of Department of Immigration and Passports, said DIP officials. The data provided by the company are full of inconsistencies and are not usable. Also, the company did not deposit most of the TK 50 crore realised from the workers as passport fees, added the officials. Despite repeated attempts, The Daily Star could not reach IRIS for comments. After the contract with IRIS ended in January, it has been refusing to cooperate with the passport issuance process. So, it is the workers and the DIP who are to pay the price. In the face of the situation, the entire process is starting from the beginning and the poor workers are going to pay for the passports again, said officials of the Bangladesh missions in the three countries.
Last year, the government appointed the Malaysian outsourcing company to enroll more than 30 lakh expatriates in Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Malaysia to meet an International Civil Aviation Organization’s deadline for the MRPs. The deadline ended on November 24 of the same year. However, only three lakh Bangladeshis could be enrolled for providing them with the passports by the deadline due to the company’s sluggish performance from the beginning, say records in the DIP. Only 2.5 lakh of the Bangladeshis received their MRPs. The company also failed to deliver MRPs to the applicants timely as the outsourcing task was full of mismanagement and irregularities. “The company was never serious about its job. Unscrupulous people and middlemen were engaged in the enrolment. They took extra money to enroll workers in different unauthorised places. All that crippled the entire MRP issuance process,” said a DIP official. While enrolling, people from the IRIS also forged birth registration certificates which made the Bangladeshi expatriates suffer in the end. On many occasions, officials of the Bangladesh missions and different Bangladesh ministries complained about the way the company was working but it did not “bother much”. Being the ministry concerned here, the home ministry should have gone tough on IRIS but it did not. It ultimately allowed the company to end the contract without completing the job, regretted the official, wishing not to be named. The issue of the 50,000 enrolled workers surfaced during the end of the contract when the workers and the officials expressed doubts about delivery of the passports. Meanwhile, the Bangladesh government has recently begun a fresh move to enroll its expatriates in the three countries for the MRPs under the missions. The Bangladeshis are crowding the missions for the passports without which they would face problems in their workplaces and during travel, said sources at the missions. “We will go through the same difficulties again. We need to take leave from work, face harassment for a few days and pay the fees from our hard-earned money,” said Asgor Ali, who works in Riyadh. He applied for his MRP in September last year from Damman Enrolment Centre but has not received it yet. “Last month, I applied again in the Bangladesh embassy in Riyadh and got enrolled. I might get it [the passport] next week,” he told The Daily Star over phone yesterday. Ismail Hossain who works in a company in Malaysia’s Putrajaya was enrolled from Kuala Lumpur Enrollment Centre early last year. He visited the centre seven times until it was shut down in this January. He will have to apply again. “It was not our fault. We were cheated by the company,” said Ismail while talking to The Daily Star last week. After the International Civil Aviation Organization deadline, immigration departments in different countries do not allow travel with manual passport. Bangladeshi workers were stopped and harassed even when they wanted to visit Bangladesh. In many cases, Bangladesh missions had to intervene to allow the workers in at airports. The Bangladesh missions in the three countries have been extending validity of the manual passports so that the Bangladeshis can continue their jobs. Terming IRIS “very irresponsible”, Bangladesh Ambassador to Riyadh Golam Moshi told The Daily Star last month, “It is frustrating that our people are suffering for a bad company.” He said IRIS closed its activities by taking money from several thousand Bangladeshis. “But it did not provide them passports. Now, our people have to spend their additional money to get passports,” he added. Two audit reports conducted over the past several months found numerous irregularities in IRIS enrolment job. Source; The Daily Star
