WHILE the country is gratifying for elevation to lower middle income status from low income as reported by World Bank, Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) survey has appeared to sidetrack the claim showing that the social and economic disparities in terms of access to wealth and education among different regions and population groups is only widening in the country. What it means is that despite the upgradation, the country needs much to do to ensure proper wealth and income distribution to give reasonable access to development of the poor. The disclosure in BBS report came on the back of the country’s stride towards higher per capita income but socio-economic disparities and urban-rural gap based on economic capacity have widened over recent past. The government claims that the economic inequality between the rich and the poor has been falling since 2010 with huge spending through social safety programme proved not based by facts as per the BBS report.
It showed desperate attempts of the poor to migrate to other countries for jobs to come out of poverty in absence of rural employment and influx of rural people to big cities, indicate the sickness of the economy. The survey showed country must do more to narrowing the rich-poor gap. The BBS survey carried by several newspapers on Monday stated that two out of five children under the age of five are stunted and three in every 10 are underweight in the country. Over 52.8 percent children from the poorest families suffer from malnourishment compared to 27 percent from the richest group. It highlighted important disparities that need to be addressed. On education, net attendance of primary school-going kids has dropped among both boys and girls between the year 2006 and 2012-13. But completion rate of primary education has risen for both the sexes in the same period but one in four kids still remain out of primary schools and the proportion is higher among boys than girls. More than half of the women aged between 20 and 24 years get married before the age of 18 and some 18 percent before 15 years.
Moreover, it showed 24.8 percent of the population drink arsenic contaminated water. The BBS report has come as an eye opener to the country’s policy makers to say that mere average statistical figure highlighting the growth is not enough to claim that the poor are equally coming up. It showed they are rather slipping out from the development net.
We must say the success of development must be adequately accessible to the poor, specially access to health and education must be high on the card because it can only bring upliftment to the poor while the rich are already spending huge for the health and education to continue their control over the national wealth. The poor must achieve faster growth now to come out of backwardness and we suggest that the government must have targeted and implementable plans for the poor to reduce the income gap and increase their access to education and other state services.
