Money is not a problem, and the government too intends to support the poor in their dire need. What's the problem then? The government does not know who to help out! According to local thinktanks, number of the poor leapt from 35 lakh to well over 6.5 crore during the 16 months into coronavirus pandemic. From middleclass to lower middleclass, lower middleclass to poor, and
Editorial
With so much at stake, lack of foresight and planning is unacceptable
A group of people trying to protect themselves from the heat as they wait in line to buy essential commodities at a slightly lower price from a truck of Trading Corporation Bangladesh. The photo was taken in front of Hotel Purbani in the capital on April 27, 2021. Photo: Amran Hossain
The second wave of the coronavirus coupled with the most recent round of lockdown, which took effect from April 14, has once again laid bare the extreme vulnerabilities faced by the urban poor in Bangladesh. According to an estimate from the BIDS, the countrywide shutdown last year had caused an 80 percent drop in income of people belonging to the labouring class in urban areas. A report in this daily yesterday details how the circumstances are likely to be the same this year, too. However, despite the severity of the situation, the government is yet to come up with a coherent plan to include these marginalised households
The government project undertaken to prepare the country s first-ever poverty registry has not been completed in more than seven years, with the data collected for it already rendered useless.
The National Household Database (NHD), initially known as the Bangladesh Poverty Database, is meant to help streamline the beneficiary selection process for social safety net programmes by gathering socioeconomic data of each household in the country.
Implemented in collaboration between the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) and the Department of Disaster Management (DDM), the project beginning in 2013 was supposed to be completed by 2017.
But the Tk 328 crore project, financed by the government and the World Bank, saw its deadline pushed to June 2021 and cost balloon to Tk 727 crore.