By Waliur Rahman BBC correspondent in Dhaka

Expatriates suffer from anxiety on arriving in Dhaka

NRBs say harassment at the airport when they arrive in Dhaka, and insecurity elsewhere in the country, discourages them from making frequent visits to their homeland.

They say they send home about $3bn each year, but a lack of opportunities for productive investment forces them to spend the money on wasteful consumer goods.

The NRBs' complaints were highlighted at a seminar in Dhaka arranged by a United Arab Emirates-based organisation on Wednesday.

The NRB Forum, based in Dubai, says their nightmare starts when they arrive at or depart from Dhaka's Zia International Airport.

They say low-income NRBs are easy victims of intimidation and extortion by officials and policemen at the airport.

'Special prayers'

Security is a serious problem for those who visit Bangladesh, says Zahirul Alam of the NRB Forum.

"For the period of their stay in the country, they live in the grip of fear and anxiety about their safety and security," he said.

Mr Alam, a doctor, says extortionists always target holiday-makers in the knowledge that they have money.

"Many NRBs told me that every time they returned to their country of residence safe and sound, they offered special prayers thanking Allah," he said.

According to official figures, nearly 2.8 million Bangladeshis work abroad, most of them in the Middle East.

Last year, NRBs sent home about $3bn, which is almost half the amount the country earned through exports.

A way ahead

The flow of remittance from Middle Eastern countries has steadily risen, but the NRB Forum says about 70% of Bangladeshi workers in the region still rely on unofficial channels to send money.

Commonly known as "hundi", these allow them to bypass official means of transferring money to their nominees in Bangladesh.

"Remittances will increase four times if the authorities take steps to stop hundi business and provide incentives to NRBs to use formal channels," says Ghulam Rab, another Emirates-based Bangladeshi.

Bureaucratic red tape make the official channels more time-consuming and costly in comparison to the hundi channels that usually take less than 24 hours to deliver money to the beneficiaries.

The Forum says to promote remittance through formal channels, the government should consider introducing an "NRB quota" in the initial public offerings (IPOs) of companies listed in the stock markets.