Government plans to send one million more workers abroad

The government is planning to send around one million workers to other countries for work to achieve target of US $20 billion foreign remittances. Secretary, Ministry of Overseas Pakistanis and Human Resource Development, Khizer Hayat, said this at Senate Standing Committee on Overseas Pakistanis on Thursday during a briefing at the Parliament House.
He said the ministry was doing its best to initiate welfare projects for the migrants and a Migrant Resource Centre was recently inaugurated to provide guidance to potential workers about the safe migration. The committee members separately also recommended to establish more protector offices in the country as per needs of the people. The committee asked the government to carry out market survey to provide more opportunities to the people of areas which had more ratio of people going abroad.
The protectorate of emigrants currently has seven offices in Pakistan situated in Karachi, Lahore, Quetta, Peshawar, Rawalpindi, Multan and Malakand. The secretary also informed the committee members that the ministry was in process of setting up protector office in Gilgit-Baltistan. The committee also called for work on eradicating rampant corruption in protector offices.
The meeting was primarily aimed at briefing from Protectorate of Emigrants and Bureau of Emigration and Overseas Employment. Director General EOBI Rana Matloob Ahmad briefed the committee that from 1971 to 2016, more than 9 million Pakistanis had proceeded abroad on work visas and the highest number was recorded in 2015 with 946,571 people moving abroad. He further said that 96 percent overseas Pakistanis were working in Gulf countries, one percent in European Union and 3 percent in other countries.
The committee was given detailed account of the number of the workers and statistics on revenue collection by different protector offices. It was told that four offices were headed by directors and three by deputy directors. Secretary of the ministry informed the meeting that Khyber Pakhtunkhwa made 12 percent of Pakistan's population but 26 percent of people working abroad were from the KP province. Similarly 500,000 people belonging to the FATA were working abroad and sending huge amount of remittances but there were fewer training facilities for people of these areas.
The ministry was also asked to increase training opportunities for people who move abroad so that they had better employment opportunities and were paid better. The ministry told the committee that the ministry was also planning to establish office and schools of Overseas Pakistanis Foundation in the FATA.