The decision of the Nepal Association of Foreign Employment Agencies (NAFEA) to shut down all its affiliated manpower agencies, in response to police raids on Wednesday on some of their affiliates, is illegal. Worse, it is a brazen attempt to black-mail the government. The decision to shut down manpower agencies denies thousands of aspirants of foreign employment—those who have already completed necessary paperwork, and paid all applicable dues—from joining their work abroad within the stipulated time. Many of them won't now be eligible for work outlined in their contracts after reneging on their commitment to arrive on time. The association accuses the police of arbitrarily raiding manpower agencies and illegally taking their owners into custody. The police on Wednesday had indeed raided 17 different manpower agencies and arrested 11 owners. But so far there is nothing to suggest that the police action was unjustified. Those arrested have been accused of cheating and exploiting foreign employment aspirants. In recent years, the police have also found manpower agencies—apparently including those raided on Wednesday—involved in human trafficking and illegal inter-state transfer of money.But according to NAEFA, the police do not have the authority to make such raids and arrests. Such authority, it says, lies only with the Department of Foreign Employment (DoFE). This is a misleading claim. If people are being openly swindled and they complain of it, it is the duty of police to look into these complaints. If in the course of police investigation they find incriminating evidence, they have every right to take action against the culprits. The manpower umbrella body will have a stronger case if it can amass enough evidence that those arrested are indeed innocent and can present such evidence in a court of law. But what the association is trying to do instead is black-mail the government into tacking back, with a single executive order, the cases against those arrested. This is not how things work in a democratic society. So the government should not, under any condition, bow down before such thugs. The open loot of foreign employment aspirants has continued for far too long. It was about time something was done about it.
So we have no problem with Wednesday's police action. We only wish that such actions were a routine affair rather than once in a blue moon thing. If there was a system to take action against manpower companies involved in wrongdoing—and there are far too many of them than the 17 raided by police on Wednesday—on a regular basis, the government would have an easier time defending its actions. The unscrupulous manpower agents are emboldened when they see that responsible agencies choose to turn a blind eye to their wrongdoing most of the time. Now that it has arrested the culprits, the government should have the nerve to prosecute them and set a strong precedent. The clear and unambiguous message should be that we are a civilized society where there is simply no room for such thuggish behavior.
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