KL to hire 10,000 Bangladeshis by next year
The Malaysian government in a bid to remove confusion over the number of workers to be recruited from Bangladesh said they would hire only 10,000 by the next year.
The confusion was created when some dailies in Malaysia last month reported that the country would start hiring 1.4 million Bangladeshis soon.
The reports were published while Bangladesh's Expatriates' Welfare and Oversees Employment Minister Khandaker Mosharraf Hossain last month met the Malaysian home and human resources ministers.
Replying to a query from a lawmaker, Malaysian Deputy Human Resources Minister Datuk Ismail Abd Muttalib told the parliament on Friday the government was actually seeking to bring in 10,000 Bangladeshis to work in oil palm plantations in peninsular Malaysia.
“The 1.4 million is actually the number of Bangladeshis who applied to their government to seek jobs overseas,” Muttalib explained, reports Malaysian daily The Star.
“As of September 23, a list of 8,703 applicants was provided by the Bangladesh government to police and Immigration Department. “From these, 2,288 have been filtered and 75 were found to have criminal records,” he said.
Ismail said recruitment of workers from Bangladesh was stringent and only three out of the 10 companies that had applied for workers had received approval.
“We approved 200 workers for Sime Darby Plantations, 262 for UP Plantations and 683 for Kulim Plantations, bringing the total number of Bangladeshi workers approved to 1,145,” he said.
Contacted, Bangladesh High Commissioner in Kuala Lumpur AKM Atiqur Rahman said it was really a misinterpretation by some local newspapers in Malaysia.
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