Jobless and poor people wait for food relief on the footpath of Maulana Bhashani Road at Ramna in Dhaka on Friday amid restrictions on public movement and activities. — Sony Ramany
Low-income people living in the capital are in hardship as Covid restrictions imposed by the government have kept them indoors and put their income generating activities on the backburner.
Thousands of people like roadside vendors, rickshaw pullers, transport workers and daily labourers who live hand to mouth in the capital city have become the worst sufferers of the current restrictions imposed on July 23 and extended till August 10, economists told New Age.
They also said that the low-income people were deprived of benefits from the stimulus packages worth over Tk 1.24 lakh crore that had been provided by the government to large and small-scale businesses in the wake of Covid pandemic since March 2020.
The cash incentive given to informal sector workers under the stimulus packages is simply insignificant, said former Bangladesh Bank governor Salehuddin Ahmed.
The government has given Tk 2,500 each in cash incentives to some 35 lakh informal sector workers three times in the past 15 months across the country.
Besides, open market sales of subsidised food items like rice, atta, edible oil, sugar and lentils have been arranged by the government for people during the restrictions imposed by the government since the beginning from July 1 to contain the worsening Covid situation.
The restrictions were relaxed between July 15 and July 22 for the celebration of Eid-ul-Azha.
The OMS programmes by the ministry of food and the Trading Corporation of Bangladesh at different points of the city areas have witnessed long queues.
Former central bank governor Salehuddin said that more cash incentives should be distributed among the urban poor in Dhaka and Chattogram where the number of informal sector workers was high.
The poor mainly bear the brunt of the Covid restrictions since more than 80 per cent of the country’s workforce is engaged in the informal sector economic activities.
A survey by the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics found that the country’s unemployment rate went up to 22.39 per cent between April 2020 and August 2020, from 5.3 per cent in March 2020 due to the 66-day shutdown enforced by the government since March 26, 2020 to check the Covid outbreak.
Unlike the previous shutdowns, the current one is the toughest since the movement of people from one city to another has been banned after the daily Covid deaths jumped over 200 in July.
However, the volume of assistance given by the government and social organisations to urban poor in the current restrictions is less visible than the past year’s activities, said former caretaker government adviser Hossain Zillur Rahman.
He said that the urban poor deserved more.
A total of 2.45 crore vulnerable non-poor people or 14.7 per cent of the country’s total population slipped into poverty due to fallouts of the Covid outbreak, according to a survey report released in April by the Power and Participation Research Centre and the BRAC Institute of Governance and Development.
Finance minister AHM Mustafa Kamal has, however, dismissed the study report, saying that the government would rely on the state-owned statistics wing for data on the new poor.
Ruhul Amin, a construction worker, is one of the new poor as he has remained jobless in most part of the past 16 months, including the shutdown periods.
Ruhul, who lives in Baghabari under Ganderia in the city’s eastern fringe, said that he was surviving the toughest challenge of his life with some savings he had before the pandemic and with the loans taken from his relatives and friends.
As the current restrictions are extended beyond August 5, he said, he would be in further trouble.
Five out of nine tenants in his neighbourhood are yet to return to the city after they went to village homes before Eid as they do not have any income, he said.
Rashed Al Mahmud Titumir, a professor at the development studies department at Dhaka University, criticised the government for failing to flatten the Covid infection curve which ultimately led to imposition of the restrictions.
Vaccination, distribution of cash incentives and improvement of hospital management are the main areas to keep the Covid infection under control, he said.
He noted that the government should have scored higher in the areas in the past one and a half years.-New Age
