Caught in cycle of poverty, Unemployment, river erosion haunt hundreds of thousands in Gaibandha

Roving Correspondent, Gaibandha

Most people in Gaibandha are caught in persistent misery, brought about by lack of investment and recurring erosion by four rivers.
Hundreds of thousands of people in the char areas face starvation in the ongoing lean period, a familiar phenomenon over the last 30 years, say officials and local.
Between October and December every year, thousands face utmost poverty and starvation in rural and char areas of the district.
Public representatives, government officials and NGO workers say the recent Zakat tragedy, in which 37 women and children were stampeded to death, serves as an indication of the prevailing misery.
Local public leaders, officials and development workers say no industrial unit has been set up in the district since independence.
According to official statistics, more than 50 per cent of some 2.2 million people in Gaibandha is landless peasants living below the poverty level.
Erosions by the Khagot, Koratoa, Teesta and Brahmaputra render landless and homeless over 20 per cent of the population at any given time.
Rickshaw pulling is the lone employment option but even the three-wheelers are so abundant that one cannot really make a living out of it. Thousands migrate to the capital or elsewhere for manual jobs.
Four of the seven thanas in the district are 'extremely flood-prone', said Deputy Director of the Department of Agriculture in Gaibandha Mohiuddin Ahmed said. "Severe flood and erosion bring in fresh misery each year."
However, he said, the situation has improved a lot from what it used to be ten years back "when the bulk of the population simply starved during the period".
"Since introduction of the high yielding variety of paddy such as the IRRI and Boro, the situation has improved as harvesting begins when the worst time hits.
"Our official figure says the district produces about 1.5 lakh metric tonnes of surplus rice every year. But this does not go a long way towards eradicating poverty because most people are landless peasants," Ahmed said.
None of the 89 non-governmental organisations (NGOs) working in the area have any micro-credit scheme for what they call "the ultra-poor" of Gaibandha.
Their micro-credit schemes are for those who have the means to pay back. Only one NGO called the Gano Unnayan Kendra has some activities for the impoverished of the char areas.
Many complain that a group of usurers take advantage of the situation, lending money at an extremely high rate.
Every individual this correspondent has talked to claimed they had borrowed money at an interest rate of 20 per cent.
There are instances when borrowers were forced to pledge their labour days in advance to repay the loans with interest.
Imtaj Ali, an erosion victim with five children, a wife and his mother to feed, said that in his lifetime he had shifted homes more than seventeen times. Having lost all of his twelve bighas of land to the Brahmaputra, he now lives in a makeshift hut on the embankment of the river. Imtaj said when he had borrowed Tk 2,000 from a loan shark, he could not even cope with the payment of Tk 400 per month as interest. Eventually he and his family were half-starving in the current harvesting season because he had to agree to work in the fields for a nominal fee to repay the loan.
The Gaibandha Sadar lawmaker and veteran Awami League leader Lutfur Rahman told The Daily Star that all his efforts to attract investment for industries had gone in vain.
Gaibandha has been gripped by 'chronic poverty' that cannot be overthrown unless investments are made, he said.
In this regard, he blamed successive governments for their indifference to development of the western part of the country.
"This area has prospects for potatoes, jute and many other items. But even my personal efforts to set up a cold storage in the region have failed. There is simply no investor," the MP said.
The common people are unanimous that lack of proper leadership is behind the failure to attract investors.
Gaibandha have had successive MPs belonging to opposition parties. They said it is well known that MPs from the opposition benches have little or no say in policymaking.
An official of a leading NGO that has some programmes for the poor in the district said the four rivers were a curse for the people.
He said during last flood season, they counted 12,000 displaced families, desperately in need of help. "We requested help from Dhaka but nobody showed any interest," he said requesting anonymity.
Many people believe Gaibandha could be a centre for industrialisation although it is situated about 20 kilometres off the Dhaka-Dinajpur highway.
They said investors could benefit from cheap labour. After the building of the Bangabandhu Bridge, it is about five hours away from the capital.