A media report has said, rickshaw pullers are braving a hard time to earn a daily meal as very few people are taking to the streets amid stringent lockdown while plying rickshaws is also under control to contain the spread of Covid-19 pandemic. These people are in a desperate search for food and cash. Although the budget has enough allocation to feed such jobless people facing starvation it is not reaching them for systemic barriers. More than half of allocation for jobless and insolvent people remained unspent last year because of such barriers, a report of Bangladesh Institute of Labour studies said last week.
So jobless people are without food and cash and this is mainly due to lack of government attention to their plights. We would wonder why the government didn’t make some minimum arrangement for food and cash for hundreds and thousands of rickshaw pullers, transport workers and such other people who live from hand to mouth. They are desperate to break the lockdown saying they don’t need lockdown; their hunger is stronger than the pandemic.
We would say the lockdown didn’t come all of a sudden. The government mobilised the army and other law enforcers taking time to enforce the lockdown but mobilisation of assistance for the jobless poor didn’t figure out to government leaders and bureaucrats. This is sad and we would wonder why the authorities
didn’t think about them in the first place and were not able to set up a system to reach help to them. Why it failed to create a database for vulnerable people in different job categories in the urban slums to bring food and cash passing through the terrible lockdown last year. Nowhere in the world are the poor left without state care while the rich pass the lockdown in leisure.
Rickshaw pullers and transport workers are not wrong when they asked why they have been forced to starvation by sheer neglect. We support the lockdown but when they say they can’t lock up their stomach to make the lockdown a success, they are also right. Media is galore with reports of angry protests. Every day is a
terrible day as income earners remain confined to their homes. We would ask the government and wealthy people to come forward with help for them.
