Korea employment EPS will be resumed only after the biometric system is implemented. Korean employment will not start for another month after the South Korean government added a condition that the biometric system is made mandatory to resume stalled employment.
Secretary at the Ministry of Labor, Employment and Social Security, Surya Prasad Gautam, said that work was underway to connect physical infrastructure for biometrics after Korea added a condition that biometric systems should be made mandatory. "The construction of physical infrastructure is starting as the employment will not be smooth in Korea without the introduction of biometric system," he said, adding that the work is planned to be completed by mid-October.
Korea has said it is pushing for a biometric system to stop fake test takers. "It is understood that the Korean government has emphasized the use of biometric systems after finding that the people who take the Korean language test and go to Korea are different," Gautam said. In the past, the police had arrested people who had participated in the Korean language test and filled out forms.
The biometric system is considered reliable because the person who takes the Korean language test has the thumbprint of the same person and therefore does not deceive the employer. Secretary Gautam said that the employer will be able to use the fingerprint taken while filling the examination form in the biometric system till the last moment.
Despite repeated requests from Nepal to resume Korean employment, which has been suspended since 2020, Korea had earlier stipulated that there should be a direct flight from Kathmandu to Seoul, that Nepali workers must stay in quarantine for 14 days and that the workers should bear the cost. As the Nepali side is ready to accept these three conditions, Korea has added another condition of the biometric system.
According to Secretary Gautam, the tender has been invited to start a direct Kathmandu-Seoul flight. Earlier, workers going to Korea for employment used to go there in transit. Secretary Gautam said that the cost of labor will increase after the start of direct flights. According to sources, the Kathmandu-Korea airfare, which currently costs around the US $400, is likely to go up to one and a half hours after the direct flight.
However, the final decision is yet to be made by the airlines participating in the tender as demanded by the ministry. After 2017, the workers were sent to Korea through various airlines in transit saying that they had to pay high airfares to go to Korea by direct flight from Kathmandu.
For a long time, Korean airlines used to take those who passed the language test for employment in Korea via direct flight. After the outbreak of the Corona epidemic, the Korean epidemic spread in Korea.
As a result, about 10,000 who passed the language test were deprived of going to Korea, according to the ministry. Some of them have passed the language test for more than two years. Before the epidemic, if you could not go to Korea for employment within two years of passing the language test, you had to take the language test again. A large number of young people compete for employment in Korea because of the good pay.
In the language test taken in 2019, about 8,000 passed and an average of 80,000 competed. Language testing has not even taken place since the Corona epidemic began. Korea has also been one of the major remittance inflows to Nepal in recent years.
