Hawking becomes lifesaver amid pandemic

Md Arif Hassan worked as a driver and lived with his five-member family in Dhaka. But he lost his job after the coronavirus pandemic hit the country last year, forcing him to look for alternative employment to keep his family afloat.

He looked for jobs but could not find any. With no other option, he said he started selling fruits on the roadside in Dhaka’s Gulistan.

Arif is among millions of people who lost jobs during the pandemic. Last year, Bangladesh Economic Association said nearly 36 million people had lost jobs between March 26 and May 30 during the general holidays.

Arif Chowdhury, president of the National Hawkers Federation, said there were an estimated 16 lakh hawkers in Bangladesh in 2018. Dhaka City alone had 3 lakh hawkers.

“The number of hawkers in Dhaka doubled in the last two years as more newly-unemployed people entered the profession,” Arif told The Business Post.

This new influx affected the hawkers’ income and pushed up costs.

Md Habib has been hawking for 10 years at Shonir Akhra in Dhaka. He reported a daily average income fall by Tk 200 in the last year as more people are taking up hawking as a profession.

“There were only two to three hawkers at Shonir Akhra before the pandemic. The number has doubled but customers did not increase. It has affected our business,” Habib said.

He explained that the new and inexperienced hawkers purchased goods at higher rates from the wholesale market, pushing up the prices there.

Ahsan H Monsur of the Policy Research Institute of Bangladesh said that anyone could join the profession anytime. “During the pandemic, many people had no option but to join this profession after losing jobs,” he said.

Those who have been in this profession for a long time face competition from the new hawkers and experience income loss, Monsur explained.

Mohammad Shohel is one of the new hawkers. He used to work for a private company and earned Tk 28,000 per month. But he became unemployed during the first spell of countrywide lockdown in 2020.

“Everything was going well until the virus outbreak,” he said.

Shohel said he had to borrow money to meet his family’s expenses. The last six months had been particularly gruelling for him, he said.

“The thoughts of paying back the loans and my family going hungry kept me awake at night,” he said. “With no solution in sight, I rented a peddled van and started selling vegetables.”