IN a country where political chaos rules supreme, Bangladesh still has a very high rate of extreme poverty where 2.6 crore people live below the poverty line. According to the Department of Disaster Management and Relief, even though poverty has been halved from 48 percent in the past five years, various social protection schemes by the government have not been able to eliminate extreme poverty completely. This was discussed at the National Forum for Social Protection (NFSP), which was launched by Manusher Jonno Foundation (MJF) with support from UKAid and AusAid. They plan to take the views of the grassroots people for the required policy reforms to make the safety net programmes more efficient, transparent and accountable, a local news report said. It showed even though 8.8 crore people are presently covered by 121 safety net schemes through 21 ministries, 24 percent of the country’s 16 crore population is still poor. The report added that recent studies show that 84 percent of 2,704 respondents reported that the selection of beneficiaries was not done transparently where many indicated the involvement of politically motivated beneficiaries in the selection process. Many people were also found unaware of the services and of the authorities whom were to report about the anomalies. To make things worse and less inclusive, female Union Parishad members were ignored in the beneficiary selection, and neither the union nor the upazila parishads were seen to maintain a complete database of households eligible for social safety benefits, reports further added. Our nation has come a long way in the process of alleviating poverty. Even then, it is not enough as many deserving citizens have been left out of such benefits due to corruption of many government officials. Poverty alleviation is a continuing process and the government must not half-heartedly support the cause by simply funding safety net schemes and ignoring the problems or obstacles associated with it. It should be the government who should be raising awareness of such schemes and setting up complaint centres so that the grievances of the people and corruption can be dealt with transparently, along with sharing necessary information with the public so that they can benefit from it. If almost one fourth of the population is still living in extreme poverty, it is blatantly obvious that the government is failing to protect the people and must take immediate steps to curb corruption and updates the list of beneficiaries to end illegally amassing power and wealth by vested interest groups.The government does not care to know that the people’s money is not for careless spending for pleasing few in the hope of political support or wasting it for unnecessary foreign trips, especially when the country’s poor are neglected every way. The poor are getting poorer and poorer. Public money is so freely and so unaccountably used in this country that will not be seen in any responsible country where the government has accountability.To cite one example. Recently more than Tk 4 crore were distributed among some truck and bus owners who lost their vehicles in the violent political movement now going on in the country. But nobody felt any accountability. Whether these buses were duly insured or not that question was also to be raised. Then, it is pertinent to ask if the payment was made for political reasons because it is known to everybody that bus owners are not poor people and not only that some of them, if not all, politically well connected. It is also unknown whether the government promises money for foiling violent politics. The government’s responsibility is to make the situation safe for public life and tackle political crisis.
