SPECIAL REPORT | By the time Abdur Razzak passed his higher secondary school exam (HSC) in 2018, his future had already been decided.

Already in a cash crisis, his father had taken on high-interest loans and mortgaged his land to raise some 400,000 Bangladeshi taka (approximately RM20,000).

The money was to pay for Razzak’s passage to Malaysia, along with thousands of other labourers recruited under the Government-to-Government Plus (G2G+) agreement brokered between Dhaka and Putrajaya...