Harun is in his 40s. Like a dozen other rickshaw pullers, he was waiting for passengers with his rickshaw. When asked why he had come out breaking the lockdown, he straightaway answered that the hungry faces of his family haunted him and prompted him to venture outside to earn daily bread as there was no food left at home.
Fifty-year-old Matin found no load to carry on his flat-bed tricycle in his Nakhalpara area of the capital. He came to Shaheenbagh to hunt for hirers. Despite knowing deserted Dhaka roads and scarcity of transportation activities, he got out of home to see alternative source of income popping up. “My heart bleeds when I hear my babies crying for food,” he said.
Housemaid Rina works at Farmgate. Within two years of her marriage, husband divorced her. She left her village home in Netrakona district and ended up in a poor neighbourhood in Dhaka. Along with fellow domestic helps, 32-year-old maid sat in a circle and was gossiping. This reporter was walking towards the circle and their topic started to be audible. She heard one of them saying, “One month has elapsed there is no work. The petty savings are finishing so fast. Bleak future haunts me very much. No employer allows me in their houses and asks me to turn up once the coronavirus disappears. I am as hungry as wolf”
Another maid Aklima started sharing her pains after Rina stopped. “Alongside working as domestic help, I used to cook food and sell it to labours in Karwanbazar. I also send some of my income to my parents and siblings back in village home. Now my elderly parents are passing terrible days and nights being unfed or half-fed.
Past the circle of the hapless housemaids, this reporter saw a 42-year-old porter Alam with his basket laid down on a footpath at Karwanbazar. With his feeble and exhausted voice, he said, “This disease (COVID-19) won’t harm the rich people rather the poor will perish because we need to eat food and babies at home need milk. I have two babies — one two year old and other four. They can’t be left unfed.” When asked whether he got any relief material, Alam said, “I got a packet of rice, pulses, potato and edible oil once, that’s all.”
This reporter met a man in dirty blue dress who said, “I am a CNG-run driver. There is hardly any passenger on empty city streets. I have come to the wholesale kitchen market so that I can buy some essentials at cheap rate. As my family lives in my village home in Gaibandha, so I have to eat outside. I used to eat from street caterers at Tk20-Tk50 but I don’t see those street caterers now. There are some people who can neither beg nor seek help because they are not used to looking for aid because of a sense of honour.”
Country is now devastated by lockdown. People can’t venture outside their home. Poor people are hard hit by the lockdown. They are deeply tensed about their livelihood, daily bread and even life. Hard time hardly passes quickly and those section lives from hand to mouth. They are not scared about contacting coronavirus or police baton in lockdown rather they are desperate for augmenting their income so that their families don’t starve to death. Time seems out of joint and nobody even lends money now and policemen struggle to dissuade the starving people from coming out of their homes breaching the lockdown situation.
When asked about the preparedness of the state and society to tackle such disaster, Associate Professor of Sociology Department at Dhaka University Mohammad Mahbub Quaisar said, “As an overpopulated country most of the inhabitants are engaged in informal sector. They are poor who outnumber those public and private sector employees. So their unemployment rate has skyrocketed which exposes the faults in the government policy. It is a great challenge for the state which won’t change for the positive overnight. Government has taken initiatives though situation may worsen further if the coronavirus pandemic is prolonged.”
When approached about the risks of social security, the sociologist said, “Hunger is unbearable and a protracted crisis will threaten the fabric of the social security. Hunger will then spark anger, prompting hungry people to resort to crimes like snatching, theft and robbery. In that case law enforcers will have to take hard stance to tackle such criminal activities and government will have to sort out other alternatives to stem the crisis.”
“In the meantime, government has earmarked Tk 95,619 crore to soften the impact of the crisis. Private sectors as well as government have come up with a variety of initiatives to address the woes of the common poor people”, he added.
Being asked about the successful and flawless implementation of the bailout packages worth nearly one lakh crore takas, Professor Mohammad Shahadat Hossain Siddiqui of DU Economics Department said, “Over 12.9 people are under abject poverty we can quote it from a statistics but nobody knows about their names and locations of these abject poor people. I don’t believe that government assurance of reaching them food will be possible because we have problem of management will hamper all the initiatives to reach the help to people in real need.”
Government service delivery system should be more efficient and transparent to show where this large sum of money is going and who are receiving what through a database, he said in reply to another query, adding that where irregularities are feared in the process of food distribution and communication is not up to the mark like the haor area of Sunamganj, cash can be sent to the accounts of distressed people.
The economist further said, “As government lacks mainly proven data about the construction and other workers, all the plans are sure to stumble or fail to mitigate the woes of the Covid-19 and lockdown victims adding that labours in the informal sectors account for 70 percent and they are out of work and in no database. But he hoped that Bangladesh would move forward despite all these things.
The government on Saturday said government has disbursed funds to procure 2 lakh tonnes of rice to provide 50 lakhs new ration cardholders with food under the ministry of disaster management and relief.
In this process one crore people will get food aid and benefitting altogether five crore people. She also said in her parliament speech that we have already announced an incentive package so that the people of the country are not harmed economically in the next 3 years. We have created this package considering the employment of people, food security, human life so that people of all walks of life such as: industry, agriculture, working people, lower class, middle class, workers, farmers, weavers, traders. Noting that we will not be short of food, he added: “The incentive package of Tk 95,719 crore is 3.3 percent of the GDP.”
