Migrated employees figure 101,365 during first half

Anjana Samarasinghe

MIGRATION: During the first six months this year 101,365 Sri Lankans migrated to other countries for foreign employment. It was 111,481 in the first half of last year.

Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment Working Director Athauda Jayawardena said the monthly average of departures fluctuates and this depends on the job opportunities created in the market.

"For last two months we were only able to send less than 100 workers per month to Korea. But at present it is more than 100 workers. Crisis in Middle East affected the total departures during this period" he said. However he is optimistic that numbers will increase by the end of the year.

Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment Manager (Research) M. Desapriya said out of this 101,365 nearly 87,000 flew to Middle East countries. Per month nearly 6,000 workers migrate to Saudi Arabia and most of them are housemaids. Desapriya said that during this period more workers went to countries like Korea and Malaysia as factory labourers.

There was a good demand for skilled labourers in the construction industry in Qatar, he said. Apart from the workers migrating to Middle East nearly 5,500 flew to Lebanon during this year.

However, migrating to Lebanon was banned by the Bureau due to the crisis in Lebanon and no departures were reported in the last two months to Lebanon, he said. Per year nearly 250,000 Sri Lankans migrate and at present there are nearly 1,500,000 migrant workers.

The total remittance brought in by the migrant workers was Rs 122 billion in the first half of this year. The minimum wage that migrant worker gets recorded as USD 2,400 per month.

Meanwhile, Central Bank and Foreign Employment Bureau together with Association of Licensed Foreign Employment Agencies have set up a program to educate migrant workers on banking facilities available to them for repatriation of foreign earnings to the country.

Experts say most of the migrant workers go for "Hundial" and "Hawala" systems to transfer their money to Sri Lanka due to high efficiency and low cost banking system. These unofficial systems cause loss to foreign exchange. Local Banks should introduce banking packages for migrant workers which would enable them to transfer money with less charges and a highly efficient method to combat these systems he said.

Under this program two State banks, Bank of Ceylon and People's bank, have introduced new facilities for migrant workers.