Staff Reporter :
A hidden hunger situation prevails in the country as the ongoing pandemic has brought the country’s economy to a standstill and 17 percent of households were still out of work in June, according to survey report.
It also found that small businesses, and those involved in unskilled and skilled labour had been the hardest hit and women had been affected more severely across all occupational categories.
Over half of the women working as housemaids in February were still out of work in June, the report said.
The survey was conducted by BRAC Institute of Governance and Development (BIGD) and Power and Participation Research Centre (PPRC) jointly. Dr Hossain Zillur Rahman, Executive Chairman of PPRC and Dr Imran Matin, Executive Director of BIGD, presented the survey findings in a webinar on Tuesday.
It was first conducted in April, and again in June with thousands of slum-dwellers and villagers across Bangladesh.
According to the survey, only a few could recover from the economic distress caused by the pandemic.
In April, a month after the pandemic started, only 50 percent of households in rural areas and 32 percent in urban slums had no economic activity.
After the shutdown was lifted, many resumed work, and this rate substantially improved in June, reaching 83-84 percent. But the revival so far has not been really translated into income recovery. Only a fraction of the per capita income lost due to the pandemic was recovered in June, the survey said.
Nowhere was this more evident than in people’s food expenditure. Per capita food expenditure that dropped after the pandemic did not improve much in June.
Thirty percent of households in June reduced food consumption to cope with the decline in income, which was a very small change compared with April. Though three meals were almost universal before the pandemic, 11 percent of urban slum-dwellers, and Six percent of rural residents, did not have three meals in June. This was as high as 15 percent in Dhaka.
A vast majority of the households were not having meat or milk since the pandemic began. This created a situation of hidden hunger, which could be detrimental to the physical and mental developments of infants and children.
The dismal scenario had a serious impact on the poverty dynamics in the country. In April, it was found that for 73 percent of the vulnerable non-poor people – defined as the group whose per capita income is above the upper poverty line but below the median national income, income had fallen much below the poverty line. They were termed the “new poor” of Bangladesh.
In June, the status of the new poor was almost unchanged. Taking them into account, the poverty rate in Bangladesh currently stands at a staggering 42 percent, the survey said.
Those living in urban areas are vulnerable twice as much due to the burdens of non-food expenditures, such as rent, utility and transportation. These are largely inelastic expenditures predominantly associated with an urban lifestyle.
Consequently, many urban residents are moving out of the city. 16 percent of respondents in Dhaka, and eight percent in Chattogram, moved to some other districts, which indicates a graver economic burden on city-dwellers.
It is clear that the pandemic is changing the extent and nature of poverty in Bangladesh, at least in the short to medium run, the survey said.
