The prime minister has opened the much-awaited Prabashi Kalyan Bank (Expatriate Welfare Bank) to reduce migration cost for Bangladeshis.
“The bank will provide intending overseas migrant workers with collateral-free soft loan, and migrant workers with low-cost and easy remittance transfer services,” Sheikh Hasina said at a launch programme on Wednesday. She also handed out loan cheques to four people prospective emigrants while opening the bank at a Sonargaon Hotel function around 11:45am.
At the same programme, she also inaugurated the fourth ministerial consultations of Colombo Process, a series of regional consultative meetings on Asian contractual migrant workers.
“It is true that we have made significant progress on migrants’ issues, but we are still far from the ideal scenario of ‘Migration with Dignity’,” Hasina said.
Unethical practices were the major challenge as unscrupulous middlemen take the advantage of desperation of poor people to go overseas, she added.
“We formed an expert committee to identify cost determinants and find out what the maximum migration costs should be,” Hasina said.
She said it was important to go for combined efforts to help regulate and combat unethical recruitment process.
“Colombo Process could be used by labourers-sending and destination countries in sharing good practices,” she added.
The prime minister said the Libyan crisis had made it clear that an effective contingency planning and mechanism were needed to deal with such complex emergencies.
She hoped that the April 19-21 consultation meetings in Dhaka would come up with good recommendations to have viable institutionalised framework to respond to such emergencies. Over 35,000 Bangladeshi workers returned from Libya since the crisis began in the North African country in mid February.
Finance minister Abul Maal Abdul Muhith, foreign minister Dipu Moni, expatriates welfare minister Khandkar Mosharraf Hossain, Indonesian minister of manpower and transmigration Muhaimin Iskandar , expatriates welfare secretary Zafar Ahmed Khan and International Organisation for Migration director general William Lacy Swing also spoke on the occasion.
Expatriates welfare and overseas employment secretary Jafar Ahmed Khan earlier said the bank would offer loans at nine percent interest rate, much lower than the commercial banks.
With an initial paid-up capital of Tk 1 billion, the bank is for a working capital of Tk 4 billion. The government will provide Tk 5 billion of the paid-up capital, while the rest will come from Wage Earners Welfare Fund.
To pave the way for setting up the bank, a law was passed by parliament in October 2010.
The new bank will have its head office on ‘One Stop Service’ building at 70-71 Eskaton Road.
Until it is ready for use, the bank will continue its operation from Bangladesh-Korea Technical Training Centre at Darussalam Road, Mirpur.

News:  The Independent/ Bangladesh/ 21-Apr-2011