KATHMANDU: Nearly 23,000 people left the troubled kingdom of Nepal between mid-November and mid-December, the highest number on record, the media here has reported.

Overseas work is increasingly popular for those Nepalese who can afford the broker’s fees in one of the poorest countries in the world, with an ongoing Maoist insurgency.

“There is no employment for young people in the countryside, and they cannot get by in the capital either. One of the main reasons is because of the ongoing conflict,” Narendra Raj Shrestha, spokesman for the Nepal Association of Foreign Employment Agencies, told AFP.

A total of 22,944 people left Nepal between 16 November and 15 December, the Kathmandu Post reported. quoting statistics from the Department of Labour and Employment Promotion. Malaysia was the most popular destination, followed by Qatar.

An estimated 1.2 million Nepalese work abroad, most in Southeast Asia, and also many in the Middle East. Last year, around 185,000 people left Nepal to seek work overseas, said Shresthra, the employment official. Brokers fees for jobseekers are between 700 and 1,000 dollars, a small fortune in Nepal, where the average annual income is still around 240 dollars.

The cash workers send back has become a mainstay of Nepal’s stagnant economy.

Overseas workers remit an average of one billion Nepalese rupees (13.88 million dollars) per week via several banks, but much more is believed to come into Nepal through unofficial channels.

Remittances from Nepalese emigrants was the major factor in reducing the number of people living below the poverty line from 42 per cent to 31 per cent in the last eight years, according to the Nepal Living Standards Survey 2003-04 conducted by the Central Bureau of Statistics.

In August 2004, 12 Nepalese workers were murdered by Al-Qaeda-affiliated extremists in Iraq. The killings caused riots on the streets of Kathmandu and more than 100 manpower agency offices were attacked. Mosques and representative offices of businesses from the Middle East were also targeted.

Since 2003, it has been illegal for labour export companies to send people to Iraq, but many workers still try to get there to land lucrative jobs in security and construction.—AFP