Flood migrants pouring into Dhaka
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Forty-seven year old Mohammad Munaf Majhi looks 10 years older than his age. His wrinkled face and desperate look suggest that not all is well with him.
“I used to collect green vegetables from farmers in my village, Shingmari,” he said. Selling the produce on the open-market in Naria, the sub-district headquarters of Bangladesh’s central Shariatpur District, he earned just under US$1.50 a day; a paltry sum, but enough for him to buy rice and `dal’ (pulses) for his 13-year-old daughter Sufia and himself. “We were happy. There was no want,” Munaf said. But then came this year’s unusually heavy monsoon rains - impacting over 10 million people in 39 of the country’s 64 districts. Heavy downpours continued from mid-July till mid-September and much of where Munaf lived was inundated. “Everything went under muddy flood water. The water stood for two weeks. The mud covered all the paddy and vegetable fields. When the water receded the whole area - from the river bank to the distant horizon - turned into a vast mud field. The vegetable fields disappeared under the mud and so did my fate,” Munaf said. Munaf’s wife died 13 years ago while giving birth to Sufia, while his 24-year-old son Belayet is married and lives in the district headquarters town of Faridpur with his wife and two children where he works as a day labourer. “I know I have to live and earn for myself and my daughter. So when a group of people from my village left for Dhaka in search of jobs, I decided to join them. I left Sufia in the custody of a close relative. The family will look after her. I will pay for that when I return home,” Munaf said. Once a vegetable vendor in Naria, Munaf now works as a rickshaw puller in Dhaka. Each morning, he goes out onto the streets of Dhaka with a rickshaw, works until 10 o’clock at night and earns around $2.5 per day. He shares a shack with two of his cousins in the city’s squalid flood protection embankment area, a 17-km long earth-filled barrier around the western and northern fridges of Dhaka, constructed in 1990 to prevent flooding in the area. “Plying rickshaw is a back-breaking job. But what else can I do?” Munif asked. He hopes one day to save up enough money to return home. Munaf is not alone in his plight. Each day a stream of migrants from other flood-affected districts arrive in Dhaka; an overcrowded city of over 11 million where unemployment is rife and prospects for a better future are limited. Migration to Dhaka “frightening” While there are no exact figures on the number of flood-affected people migrating to Bangladesh’s largest city, current estimates place their numbers at around 3,000 a day. “This is in addition to the normal flow of rural to urban migration. This is frightening. Dhaka does not have the space, neither physical nor economic, for so many people,” noted Professor Atiur Rahman of the Department of Development Studies at Dhaka University. “If the flow continues for more than a month we should prepare ourselves to face a catastrophe in human terms,” he warned. Echoing that sentiment, Abdus Sattar Bhuiyan, a senior economist of the Bangladesh Planning Commission, called for better long-term planning for the creation of attractive jobs at the district and sub-district levels. “We cannot stop people from coming to Dhaka when they do not have any jobs in their local areas. It is not the beauty of Dhaka city that attracts them, [but] rather the absence of a means of survival in the rural and semi-urban regions that drive them here,” Bhuiyan explained. Source: IRIN News |
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