A year gone yet wait not over

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.

And 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 a contract between home ministry and IRIS ended in January, the company refused to cooperate with the passport issuance process. So, it is the workers and the DIP who are to be in trouble.

In this situation, the entire process has to start from scratch and the poor workers are going to pay for their 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, due to the company's sluggish performance from the beginning, only three lakh Bangladeshis could be enrolled for the passports, say records in the DIP.

Some 2.5 lakh of them received their MRPs later.

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 the job. Unscrupulous people and middlemen were engaged in the enrolment. They took extra money to enroll workers in different unauthorised places. All these crippled the entire MRP issuance process,” said a DIP official.

During the enrolment process, 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 IRIS 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 towards the end of the contract when the workers and the officials expressed doubts about the 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 MRPs without which they would face problems in their workplaces and also during travel overseas, said sources at the missions.

However, the expatriates are not that happy.

“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 had applied for his MRP in September last year at Damman Enrollment Centre but has not received it yet.

Ismail Hossain who works for a company in Malaysia's Putrajaya was enrolled at Kuala Lumpur Enrollment Centre early last year. He visited the centre seven times until it was shut down this January. He will also have to apply again.

“It was not our fault. We were cheated by the company,” said Ismail told 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 homeland. 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 passport,” he added.

Two audit reports conducted over the past several months found numerous irregularities in IRIS enrolment job, said a DIP official, wishing not to be named.

“IRIS officials in Saudi Arabia declined to submit the actual information about revenue collection when an audit team headed by our director SM Nazrul Islam demanded it from them,” said the official.

Asked about the misdeeds of the company, DIP Director General Brig Gen Masud Rezwan refused to make any comment. He, however, said they had already sent DIP officials to the countries to help the expatriates get their MRPs.