LALMONIRHAT A district with signs of increased prosperity in Bangladesh |
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Signs
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By
Anis Ahmed LALMONIRHAT,
Bangladesh—Mahendra Barman, virtually a pauper five years ago, now considers
himself a “complete man”— a symbol of success to many in his village with
an annual income of about 15,000 taka (US$259). He
grows enough grain for his five-member family and raises poultry and cattle
to supplement his income. The most prized is a cow of foreign stock that
gives at least 10 liters of milk a day. Barman sells the milk to buy daily
necessities and has leased a pond to breed fish. He grows vegetables in
his yard. His
newfound wealth all started with a loan from a local aid group, the Rangpur-Dinajpur
Rural Service, which offers credit to villagers in six districts in northern
Bangladesh. “Today,
I am a complete man and the happy head of a small family,” Barman, 47,
told Reuters recently. Bangladesh
is the world’s most crowded country of any size and one of the poorest.
Nearly half of its 131 million people live in rural villages and about
30 percent of the working population makes less than a dollar a day as
farm laborers, rickshaw-pullers and porters. Making
lives better for people such as Barman is key to breaking the cycle of
poverty and migration to overcrowded towns and cities in a country bedeviled
by chronic flooding and horrific cyclones. “He
is a model of success and is a source of inspiration to many,” said RDRS
program officer Mohammad Al-Muntazir in Lalmonirhat, 240 miles north of
the capital, Dhaka. He
said Barman was a member of the service’s Integrated Household Farming
program, and received a 10,000 taka, one-time collateral-free loan five
years ago. Model
of self-reliance He
has repaid his loan and now counsels other villagers on how to beat poverty
and attain self-reliance. If
not on a par with Barman, many villagers in Bangladesh’s poorer northern
areas now live a better life, eat at least two meals a day and send their
children to schools. “This
would not have been possible without the help of the NGOs [nongovernmental
aid organizations] and the government,” villager Boiragi Kumar said. Tapan
Kumar Karmaker, RDRS director in Rangpur, where the operation’s headquarters
is based, said more than 100 aid groups worked in the northern districts
trying to end a cycle of abject poverty among the people there. RDRS
has offered credit to nearly 300,000 people, six percent of the population
in the six districts long known for endemic poverty and hunger. The
loan recovery rate is a respectable 87 percent. The
NGOs also counsel and train their mostly illiterate borrowers on how to
best use their money and adopt the habit of regular compulsory savings.
“Every week they pay back fixed installments of their credit—offered at
14 percent annual interest—and deposit a minimum savings of five taka
with us,” said RDRS official Debashish Das. But
microloans are not the only way one of the world’s poorest areas is getting
a boost up the economic ladder. Money
sent home by Bangladesh’s expatriate workers is also providing a much-needed
injection of cash into villages. About
2.7 million Bangladeshis, mostly working in the Middle East, send home
about US$2.8 billion every year, accounting for 5.5 percent of the country’s
gross domestic product. The
money has given homes to the homeless and land to the landless, and allowed
others to start small businesses. The
government is widely praised for offering free tuition and cash incentives
of up to 125 taka a family each month to send all children to primary
schools and give free college education for girls, who have long been
denied schooling. Academic
revolution This
has “revolutionized the academic scenario” in villages, with schools now
brimming with students, said a Rangpur official. The drop-out rate has
also declined, as many parents no longer need to use their sons to supplement
the family’s income. Even
at the bottom of the financial ladder, things seem to be improving. Daily
wages for farm laborers and other menial workers have nearly doubled to100
taka over the past five years. “I
am happy to be able to get fed everyday,” said Zakir Hossain, 25. With
clouds hovering in the sky and twilight descending on his tranquil village
on the banks of the river Teesta, Hossain sat under a mango tree and relaxed
in a gentle breeze, after a day’s hard work. “We
get some rest only during the night. In the morning, it’s all the same
again,” he said, smiling. His wife, Suraiya, said she is happy that her
husband now has work every day. “Previously,
he used to find work only one or two days in a week. We suffered a lot
during those days,” she added. The
rural economy has changed for the better in recent years, with most people
now able to support themselves, said Matiur Rahman, editor of daily Uttar
Bangla, in Dinajpur, a town near Rangpur. “But
poverty had been so widespread all over the country, especially in the
north, that it is impossible to eliminate it in a few years. We have
still a long way to go,” he said. |
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