NEW DELHI: The Human Resources Ministry has renewed the memorandum of understanding (MoU) on the recruitment of foreign workers from India that lapsed 10 years ago, thus updating recruitment procedures and preventing exploitation.
Human Resources Minister Steven Sim, said the original MoU expired in 2014 but in the past 10 years, some 160,000 foreign workers from India have entered Malaysia without any policy setting the recruitment procedures.
"Last year we started discussions and obtained approval for a new MoU. This year we have signed a new MoU in conjunction with the official visit of Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim, to India.
"After this, hiring guidelines from India will be more transparent, fairer, and more orderly in addition to ensuring that there are no bad practices such as the exploitation of foreign workers, which ultimately only harm the country and local workers in Malaysia.
"Sectors that are seen as critically needing foreign workers include services, plantations, and the largest, agriculture, in addition to the highly skilled formal sector, of which this ministry records approximately 85,000 people," he said.
He said this at a press conference after accompanying the prime minister on a three-day working visit to India, which ended yesterday.
In total, Malaysia and India exchanged eight MoUs covering various sectors including the recruitment of foreign workers, traditional ayurvedic medicine, digital technology, culture, tourism, and public administration.
Sim added that Malaysia receives engineering and technical workers from India but the sectors with a critical shortage of labor are restaurants and barbershops, the filling of which are currently being discussed.
He said, the requirements were geared towards domestic needs and had nothing to do with the source country, which is India.
"I discussed with various chambers of commerce and business associations of India, especially in three sectors, namely hairdressing, goldsmithing, and traditional textiles of the Indian community.
However, Sim stressed that the new MoU is not aimed at bringing in more workers because the maximum limit has already been set, but rather to ensure that the recruitment process is more orderly and guided by law.
In addition, the ministry also signed a second MoU with the National Skill Development Center under India's Ministry of Skill Development, to strengthen its relationship with TalentCorp.
"The ministry developed a digital portal for all skills training and issues such as job placement and job matching in one integrated ecosystem portal," he said.
Meanwhile, Digital Minister Gobind Singh Deo signed an MoU on cooperation in the digital technology sector with India's Minister of External Affairs, S Jaishankar, to strengthen the relationship between the government agencies of the two countries, especially in the digital aspect.
"We see that India is indeed ahead in the field of new technology and the Indian government has already identified certain aspects that are needed to strengthen the infrastructure so that this new technology can be widely used to strengthen all industries.
"Under the MOU we will look at how we can cooperate so that steps taken by India to strengthen and expand the use of new technology can also be implemented in Malaysia.
"We also have to see how the existing infrastructure is safe to use, especially in the aspect of cyber security, where we want to ensure that Malaysia has enough talent to protect company data or assets," he said.