By Mizan Rahman Dhaka
In a significant move, Bangladesh has offered bank loan for workers going to Malaysia to meet cost of migration.
The state-owned banks and Expatriate Welfare Bank have already made arrangement to provide the potential migrants with loan to cover their expenses including air passages, visa fee, training fee, medical bill, travel taxes and other
related expenditure.
The banks initially estimated that the cost of migration for a person would be around 40,000 taka and the bank would offer people the entire amount as loan at 9% annual rate of interest.
The banks will recover the loan on installments from migrants under agreements with their employers. The persons, authorised by the migrants, can also pay back the loans on installments.
“A total of 500,000 workers from Bangladesh will get jobs in Malaysia in the next five years. Each of the migrants can have loan from the Expatriate Welfare Bank,” Expatriate Welfare Bank managing director C M Koyes Sami told newsmen in Dhaka yesterday.
The workers will be sent to Malaysia under the government to government arrangement, which will be finalised next week in Kuala Lumpur.
In the first phase, 50,000 workers will be sent to Malaysia, beginning from January next year.
Sami said the potential migrant who wants to get loan should open an account with the bank and the bank would pay the airfare directly to the airline to protect people from forgery.
Besides the loan, he said the migrants would get priority cards, which would entitle them to get priority services from the Bangladesh High Commission in Kuala Lumpur.
