Rural Bangladesh showing signs of prosperity

– Reuters

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 15,000 taka ($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 litres of milk a day.

Barman sells the milk to buy other daily necessities. He has leased a pond to breed fish and grows vegetables in his backyard.

His new-found wealth all started with a loan from a local aid group, the Rangpur-Dinajpur Rural Service, which offers small 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, said recently.

Bangladesh is the world’s most crowded major country and one of the poorest.

Nearly half of its 131 million people live in rural villages and about 30 per cent of the working population makes less than a dollar a day as farm labourers, 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 bedevilled by chronic floods and horrific cyclones.

“He is a model of success and is a source of inspiration to many,” said RDRS programme officer Mohammad Al Muntazir in Lalmonirhat, 400 km north of the capital, Dhaka.

He said Barman was a member of the service’s Integrated Household Farming programme, and received a 10,000 taka, one-time collateral-free loan five years ago.

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 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 per cent of the population in the six districts long known for endemic poverty and hunger.

The loan recovery rate is a respectable 87 per cent.
The NGOs also counsel and train their mostly illiterate borrowers on how to best use their money and develop a habit of compulsory savings.

“Every week they pay back fixed installments of their credit – offered at 14 per cent annual interest – and deposit a minimum savings of five taka with us,” said RDRS official Debashish Das.

But micro-loans are not the only way that 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 $2.8 billion every year, accounting for 5.5 per cent 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 credited for offering free tuition and cash incentives of up to 125 taka per family each month to send all children to primary schools and give free college education for girls, who had long been denied schooling.

This has “revolutionised 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 labourers and other menial workers have nearly doubled to 100 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 being 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.