Nirmal Gurung, President of the Nepal Association of Foreign Employment Agencies, has been trying to get the industry back to normal after the devastating attacks on 300 member offices in Kathmandu on 1 September. Despite everything, he tells Nepali Times he is optimistic.

What actually happened to your own investigation on the 1 September vandalism?
We have done our investigation and we are submitting the report to the government's investigation committee. We are working very closely with the government in this regard. A copy of the report will also be given to the Department of Labour.

Is the issue of compensation also being sorted out?
Since the government has agreed to provide compensation of Rs 500,000 to the manpower agencies whose offices were destroyed and has assured it will cooperate in other ways, we have suspended the idea of setting up a pressure committee for now.

What "other cooperation"?
We have been assured that documents like passports that were destroyed during the vandalism will be reissued by the government.

How long before business gets back to normal?
It has already. Of course, there are challenges preventing smooth operation, but we have taken the challenge and have opened our shops again. A lot of documents have been destroyed, but we are trying. We have to. How can we just sit idle? The hopes of a lot of people waiting to work abroad are resting on us.

Are you getting workers willing to go abroad?
We are getting even more clients than in the past. More and more people are willing to go abroad to work. Most of them wish to go to the Gulf countries like Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Dubai. Significant numbers of workers are going to Malaysia as well.

What about Iraq?
People do not even want to utter the name of that country.

What kind of volume are we talking about now?
We can only give figures once we begin to run smoothly and accumulate data. Normally, around 200,000 Nepalis go out of the country to work every year and it will take time to reach that number again. The workers send home about Rs100 billion every year.

Was there an element of rivalry between various groups of manpower agencies that led to the vandalism on 1 September?
This is a conspiracy theory to divide manpower agents. We are all one and we have nothing against one another. The vandalism that took place on 1 September was the result of the anger due to the killings of the 12 Nepalis in Iraq. People simply could not control their anger and they went out to destroy things.

But the rivalry between the two sides is said to have existed for quite sometime now.
I am not aware of it. What I know is that manpower agents in Nepal have always been and still are united.

Any comment on the arrest of your vice president after he and other association members allegedly ransacked the Department of Labour last week?
The matter has been resolved and I do not want to comment on it. We have reached a compromise with the government agency and so we do not want to dig the dead issue up again.

Your executive members have had differences on this issue too.
The differences are due to the government's efforts to divide us.

You mean to say the officials at the Labour Ministry and Department are trying to divide you?
Yes. And by doing that, they reap benefits. That has been their way for quite some time now.