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Why G2G foreign employment is the only way to go?
Yesterday, our nepo Grandpa who happens to be Gagan Thapa's father-in-law, Arjun Narsingh KC, took his oath as being the oldest lawmaker in the new House. Today, he administered the oath of office to all other lawmakers and tomorrow Balen and his cabinet members will take their special oath as Prime Minister and ministers. Let us wish all or lawmakers and then the cabinet wallahs all the best and hope we will see a much better Nepal in the days to come.
We all know very well that it will be very difficult to generate employment in thousands with the resources we have and unless we get foreign investment and that too for maybe garment stuff, let us not even hope for any new employment in hundreds of thousands. We are not getting much help when it comes to tariffs so we will not be competitive as Bangladesh or Vietnam so let us not have much hope in bringing in foreign garment wallahs to outsource their stuff here in Nepal.
And all the guff about how we can make Nepal some kid of an AI hub and have 100,000 programmers making six figures is nothing but wishful thinking for now. Even most of the IT companies established by our NRNs overseas who have their subsidiaries here pay less than a lakh Rupees which is less than US$1,000 a month while they happily charge three or four times more to their clients in the West.
I don't blame them because the only reason they have subsidiaries here is because of cheap labor. All of them want to make profit or cut costs and be it IT or any other work, the only reason most of the foreign companies will be here is because they can pay cents while saving dollars if they had to hire the staff doing the same work in the West.
Most of the IT workers I see here in Nepal are doing the outsourcing work and in average the good ones make around Rs 70,000 and the beginners make Rs 20,000 to Rs 30,000 if they are lucky while some IT companies pay much less in the name of internship and fellowship and what not. My cousin is a senior manager working for a US subsidiary here. He makes like Rs 108,000 per month. His cousin is a programmer. He makes Rs 58,000, and then another cousin who just graduated from college, is paid a measly Rs 18,000.
Well, you might say something is better than nothing or maybe it will be better if our IT workers are paid fair wages and that is where the new government can use their power to enforce at least a minimum monthly wage for outsourced IT workers where they get paid at least a third of what the workers in the US or developed countries receive.
Let us talk about the IT sector some other day. I was reading about Germany hiring Indians to fill up positions at thousands of local businesses because there were not enough young Germans to learn skills like plumbing, baking, welding, and other trade skills. GIZ funds such vocational training in Nepal and gives millions of dollars every year for such projects.
Maybe, instead of boasting about how 600 people are trained every year as Solar technician or how 4,000 learned plumbing and this and that... why not just work out a deal with the German government to recruit at least 250,000 young men and women and give them four-year apprenticeship in Germany?
If we can work out such kind of deals then we will be sending at least half a million young folks to places like Germany, Italy and other Western European countries where they are now facing massive shortage of trade skill workers. If our young folks get to learn the language, pass their tests and get to work as plumbers, electricians, bakers, crane operators, welders there then they will most likely get fair wages, at least US$ 3,000 to 5,000 per month instead of getting one-tenth of that amount and living in harsh conditions in the Middle East.
The SEE exams are around the corner. Every year, half a million students take the exam and more than 50% fail the exam. Not all of our students need to excel academically. Some may have better technical minds than memorizing the textbooks.
We have to really sit down with our Asian tigers such as Japan, South Korea , Singapore and also Germany, Switzerland and other Western countries and figure out how we can help millions of our young ones to learn new langague, a vocational skill and get paid well and contribute to help their economies while then hoping that a decade later, we will have enough of these skilled manpower here at home so these countries then can open their factories here as well.
We do have some kind of a deal with South Korea with their EPS thing but due to our incompetent government agencies, many who have passed the Korean language test have still not found employment in Korea. And those who have been lucky are making at least US$1,500 a month.
I think maybe it's time we scrap all the licenses of our manpower agencies who have managed to send in more than 5 million young ones abroad in the past two decades and have made a record more than US$ 5 billion dollars (conservative estimate) in the name of visa processing and job placement overseas. And let us not only blame our manpower agencies aka human trafficking agencies for all the money extorted from our young ones. We have the agents in the villages, local mundreys like Milan Chakreys and others who ask for Dashain kharcha, and immigration and labor departments and then ministers and then the top leaders of the ruling parties who have all enjoyed the dough extorted from our folks who had to leave for better employment opportunities.
I think we need a foreign labor department that handles all placement overseas, and if we have people like Sudan Gurung or Ashika Tamang as chairperson of this department, then we can expect no corruption by sarkari hakims or anyone. Or maybe, this department can be run by volunteers who receive stipends while all our immigrant counters at TIA and labor departments have CCTVs from all sides and then the footage can be broadcast live on the web to make sure the bad apples are not seeking bribes again.
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Last edited: 26-Mar-26 07:34 AM
