Oman lifts restrictions on skilled Bangladeshi workers

The Omani government has announced exemptions to its visa ban for certain groups of Bangladeshi nationals, allowing skilled professionals and tourists to visit the West Asian country for their respective purposes. 

The Embassy of the Sultanate of Oman Bangladesh – Dhaka confirmed the development through a press release on Wednesday.

“The Embassy would like to officially confirm that a decision was taken lately by the relevant authorities in Oman to exempt certain categories of Bangladeshi nationals from the visa ban issued in October of last year. The exempted categories are: family visas, visitation visas for citizens of Bangladesh residing in GCC countries, physician visas, engineer, nurse, teacher, accountant, investor, all types of official visas and high income tourists,” reads the press statement.

As a result, from now on the Omani embassy will receive and process all applications from applicants belonging to the above mentioned categories and will coordinate duly with Royal Oman Police (ROP) to issue the visa. 

Stating that applications will take one to four weeks to process, the embassy advised aspirant visa seekers to submit their application with documents duly attested. 

“The Embassy would like to reassure all concerned with ban on work visa that many steps have been taken by authorities and officials in Oman and Bangladesh to pave the way towards lifting the ban on work visas as soon as practicable,” the embassy said in the statement.

The embassy, however, hasn’t stated anything about when the Sultanate of Oman will resume taking unskilled workers from Bangladesh.

Recently, while visiting three countries, including the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Qatar and Oman, State Minister for Expatriates’ Welfare and Overseas Employment Shofiqur Rahman Choudhury discussed the matter with the Omani authorities and claimed that apart from reopening labour market on certain categories, the Oman government assured him of legalising 96,000 illegal Bangladeshi workers.

It is to be mentioned that in an unprecedented move, the Sultanate of Oman suspended the issuance of visas across all categories for Bangladeshi nationals on 31 October last year.

According to the Bureau of Manpower, Employment and Training (BMET), Bangladesh exported a total of 18,33,241 workers to Oman during the period of 1976-2023, sharing 11.91% of the country’s total manpower export to overseas markets during the same period.

Currently, over 7 lakh Bangladeshis work in the West Asian country and send foreign currency worth USD 80-90 crore per year.

In the first six months of 2023, Oman was the third most favourite destinations for Bangladeshi workers after the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Malaysia surpassing the UAE, Kuwait, Singapore and Qatar. 

Bangladesh sent some 76,679 workers during this period which was 12.42% of its total outbound workers.