More and more Bangladeshi mariners are being cheated in the name of jobs on board foreign vessels.
Last month, 19 Bangladeshis were cheated by a broker who took money from them and asked them to go to India to get jobs on a foreign ship.
Five other Bangladeshis contacted with the Bangladesh mission in New Delhi on Thursday with similar stories.
“This is alarming. They are not ignorant adventure-loving people but they are very bright and intelligent people. Yet they fall prey to cheaters,” said a foreign ministry official.
All the cheated people are students of different marine academies that have been mushrooming in Bangladesh.
The popular perception is that poor and uneducated people fall prey to such cheating but this GPA 5 Facebook generation is also not immune to human trafficking as they are allured by cheaters with promises of lucrative jobs on foreign vessels, the official said.
“Not only that, they [the five who contacted the Bangladesh mission] claimed that they had paid Tk3 lakh each to their brokers,” he added.
Lack of public awareness is the main reason behind such cheating, the official felt.
It is very much clear that there is no difference between the educated and uneducated classes in Bangladesh as far as opportunity to go out of the country is concerned.
Citing example, he said due to awareness programmes of the government, the number of such incidents is much lower in India.
At present, Bangladesh has 19 marine academies in both private and public sectors and they enroll about 900 cadets each year.
Compared to this large number of cadets, there are only four flag carriers in the public sector and 27 in the private.
“It is impossible to provide training to such a large number of cadets with such a few ships,” said another government official.
The Shipping Department must have known about such cases of cheating as they had given clearance to such adventurous undertakings, the official said.
In recent months, countries including Saudi Arabia, Singapore, United Arab Emirates and Hong Kong have informed the Bangladesh government that they would not recruit any Bangladeshi mariners due to widespread use of false documents.