NEW DELHI: The hiring of migrant workers from India is set to be more transparent, fair and orderly with the signing of a new memorandum of understanding (MOU) between both governments here on Tuesday, says the Human Resources Minister.
Steven Sim (pic) said the original MOU lapsed in 2014, resulting in a decade of no clear guidelines on managing the recruitment of workers from India.
“Despite that, more than 133,000 Indian workers still entered Malaysia. With the signing of this new MOU, we can avoid bad practices such as the exploitation of migrant workers, that can have a negative impact on the country and local workers,” he said, Bernama reported.
Sim was among the ministers who accompanied Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim, who ended his three-day official visit to India on Wednesday.
Anwar and his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi witnessed the signing of the MOU at Hyderabad House on Tuesday.
Sim said a second MOU was signed between TalentCorp Malaysia and a skills development centre in India to develop an integrated skills training ecosystem and to handle job matching.
On the employment sector, he said six critical sectors in Malaysia needed migrant workers from India, including the service sector, plantations and agriculture.
There are over 85,000 highly-skilled workers from India employed in the engineering and technical fields in Malaysia.
