User:Radeeb/Rural poverty in Bangladesh


 *  Poverty': Poverty (also called penury) is deprivation of common necessities that determine the quality of life, including food, clothing, shelter and safe drinking water, and may also include the deprivation of opportunities to learn, to obtain better employment to escape poverty, and/or to enjoy the respect of fellow citizens.

Poverty: How it is measured?

Poverty levels are mainly determined based on income and consumption levels. But evidence, and the voices of poor people themselves, have shown that poverty can take many other shapes. Poverty means hunger, lack of medical service, and poor access to basic services, like electricity and water supply. It can also mean being unable to send children to school and often needing them to work hard instead. Poverty means a lack of assets—such as land or savings—and thus extreme vulnerability to shocks due to economic downturns, family illness or natural disasters. It means social exclusion, and a constant feeling of insecurity and stress based on an unpredictable future.

Introduction
Bangladesh being one of the world’s poorest countries is ranked third after India and China in the extent of extreme poverty. The population is mostly dominated by the rural containing about three fourth of the people living in rural areas. In order to keep their families running rural people depend mainly on the land, which is both fertile and simultaneously vulnerable. flood plain makes up the most of the country while the alluvial soil provides good arable land, large areas are at risk because of frequent floods and cyclones, which take lives and destroy crops, livestock and property often resulting massive damage in the countryside where people are mostly poor.

Poverty: Profile in Bangladesh
Poor people in Bangladesh tend to lack education and can afford limited land and hold low paying, physically demanding, and socially unattractive professions, such as casual wage labor. We can notice that in both urban and rural areas the poor lack access to modern accommodations and services, and they also tend to live in houses of awefull quality. Households headed by women, who are widowed, divorced, or separated, have a considerably higher incidence of poverty relative to the others.

Poverty: Reason behind this.
One of the main causes of rural poverty in Bangladesh is the erratic and extreme climate and the fact that a large proportion of the country is low-lying and vulnerable to flooding. Many of Bangladesh 's rural poor people live in areas subject to extreme annual flooding, which can destroy their crops, homes and livelihoods causing a massive damage and deaths. Many poor people have to rebuild houses for their shelter and they often have to resort to moneylenders in order to rebuild their lives which pushes them deeper into poverty. For the large numbers of rural poor people whose subsistence depends on agriculture, income and food security are highly precarious. Many farmers eke out a livelihood on small and fragmented plots. For those who are landless or almost landless, the situation is even more severe. Almost half of the population falls into this category.

Another root cause of rural poverty has been the enormous population growth and the pressure it has placed on the environment, unleashing problems such as erosion and flooding that in turn aggravate the situation of rural poor people.

Bangladesh has made progress in developing rural infrastructure, but much remains to be done. Many poor people living in remote areas lack services such as education, health clinics and adequate roads, particularly road links to markets. Only 19 per cent of rural households have electricity.

Poverty: Where are they?
Apart from hilly areas in the extreme north-east and south-east, Bangladesh is made up entirely of low-lying deltaic flood plain. Poverty is concentrated in three areas: the north-west, which is prone to drought and river erosion; the centre-north, which is subject to severe seasonal flooding that limits crop production; and the southern coastal zones, which are affected by soil salinity. The direct link between chronic poverty and unfavourable agricultural environments is becoming increasingly apparent, partly as the result of difficult climatic conditions and partly as a consequence of mismanagement of natural resources and the enormous population pressure on the land.

Poverty : Who are the rural poor?
About 20 per cent of rural households live in extreme poverty. Chronically poor people suffer persistent food insecurity, own no cultivable land or assets, are often illiterate and may also suffer serious illnesses or disabilities and often handicapped due to lack of medical treatment. Another 29 per cent of the rural population is considered moderately poor. They may own a small plot of land and some livestock, but while they generally have enough to eat, their diets lack protein and other nutritional elements. This segment of the rural population is at risk of sliding deeper into poverty as a result of health problems or natural disasters. Injury or crop failure caused by unexpected and severe weather conditions frequently ruins the livelihoods and the hopes of many Bangladeshis.

Small-scale farmers may subsist at either of these levels of poverty. Their livelihoods are precarious, both because of the seasonal nature of farm income and because natural disasters such as floods and drought may periodically destroy their crops and animals.

Women are among the poorest of the rural poor, especially when they are the sole heads of their households, such as widows or wives of men who have migrated in search of employment. They suffer discrimination because of their gender, they have scarce income-earning opportunities and their nutritional intake is often insufficient. Among extremely poor people, there is a disproportionate number of households headed by women.Fishing communities are also among the poorest and most disadvantaged groups in the country.

Making Progress
In the 1990s alone, poverty in Bangladesh shrank by 9 percent, stemming in large part from strong, sustained economic growth, with an average annual GDP increase of about 5 percent and a rise in real per capita GDP of 36 percent, or twice the average rate of other low- and middle-income countries. During the same decade, the population growth rate was brought down to an annual average of 1.5 percent—a major social achievement which was an essential requirement for poverty reduction. Vulnerability of poor people to economic downturns and natural disasters was significantly reduced through government safety net programs. The number of children completing grade five increased by 12 percent, and every year around one million jobs were created for new entrants to the country's work force, many of whom are women.

Bangladesh have made satisfactory progress in reducing child malnutrition, with its ill effects, such as low birth weight and stunting, reduced by 20 to 25 percent over the decade. Literacy was increased by 12.5 percent, and the country reached parity between boys and girls in primary school enrollment. Recently, Bangladesh has made significant improvements in controlling expenditures, mobilizing revenues, closing loss-making state enterprises, and exerting more discipline on other state-owned enterprises. These actions have brought public finances back into a better balance which proved to be a major requirement to free up more money to be spent on social services.

Meeting new challenges
As the percentage of Bangladesh's total population living in poverty is being reduced, the absolute number of people living in poverty has changed little over the decade because of continued population growth. Home to 135 million people, Bangladesh currently  eighth  in the table of the most populous country in the world with the highest population density—nearly 950 people per square kilometer. The current annual population growth rate of 1.5 percent—while commendable and lower than rates in the neighboring countries of India and Pakistan—is still not low enough to allow significant overall poverty reduction.

Population growth has the potential to erode progress in provision of social services, and significant reforms at the national level are needed to ensure adequate coverage. As of 2000, only 45 percent of Bangladeshis were considered literate, and an estimated 25 percent of 6 to 10 year-olds were not in school. Malnutrition and maternal mortality rates are still among the highest in the world, and at least one in three mothers in Bangladesh gives birth without ever having seen a health practitioner. Inequality in Bangladesh has certainly increased, particularly in urban areas, with incomes growing much faster for some households than for others. Had recent growth been more broad-based, the cumulative decline in poverty would have been much greater than the nine percentage point drop. In 2000, among the poorest 20 percent of the population, four out of five owned less than half an acre of land, and landlessness has been increasing in rural Bangladesh. Indications are that Bangladesh's economy has slowed recently, when it needs to expand significantly in order to maintain the poverty reduction momentum. Government fiscal deficits rose to 6 percent of GDP in fiscal year 2001, financed in large part by higher domestic bank and non-bank borrowing. The losses of state-owned enterprises were on average equivalent to 30 percent of budgetary spending on health and education during the 1990s. Continued high losses could precipitate a fiscal crisis that would jeopardize the macroeconomic stability of the past decade. In such a situation, the poor are the most likely to lose benefits due to resulting budget cuts. The government has begun making efforts to reverse these losses.

Government plans
This situation seems to imply a lack of progress in Bangladesh's ongoing war on poverty. But the mere existence of such data offers a ray of hope for those who are fighting in the front lines. Launched in October 1994 by the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS), the Poverty Monitoring Survey (PMS) provides a snapshot of the extent twice a year, processes, and dynamics of poverty throughout the country — information which was previously not available to government planners.

Looking ahead
"For Bangladesh to meet its poverty reduction goals, it must grow its economy faster than ever has—with an annual average GDP growth rate of at least 6 percent," said Salman Zaidi, a World Bank senior economist for Bangladesh. "That may seem like a tall order, but it is possible, as long as the country maintains consistency of commitment and effort." Zaidi putts Vietnam as an example, which has per capita GDP and population growth rates similar to Bangladesh and which maintained an average annual GDP growth rate of 8.4 percent per year from 1992 to 1998 unlike Bangladesh.

In order to reform its fiscal situation, Bangladesh would need to reform, and in many cases privatize, state-owned enterprise to free resources for public interventions in the areas of education, health, and other essential services.

Broad-based, accelerated economic expansion could prove out to be the way to free millions of Bangladeshis out of poverty in the next dozen years or so if policies designed to stimulate growth also focus on expanding economic opportunities for Bangladesh's poor people, helping them to maximize the earning power of their current assets and to increase their holdings higher than ever. Because most of Bangladesh's poor people live in rural areas, accelerated agricultural growth through raising productivity of the workers and diversifying crops is a priority, along with improving the operation of land markets and further developing fisheries and livestock—important assets for the landless.

Support for growth of non-farm, rural economic activities—such as manufacturing, construction, and white collar jobs—is also mandatory to reach the goals, as is increasing access to services such as microcredit to support establishment and expansion of small enterprises. Since good health and higher education levels have been shown to directly and positively impact income levels, increased and better targeted investments in these areas, with a focus on reaching the poorer, underserved population, are necessary.

The government's responsibility to create and maintain an enabling environment to raise economic returns on private assets is equally important. If farms and firms cannot operate profitably because of macroeconomic instability, poor infrastructure, or bureaucratic harassment, increasing people's ability to accumulate private assets will bring only limited benefits.

Maintaining macroeconomic stability and improving governance are essential—in particular, increasing accountability of public officials and institutions and reversing the deteriorating law and order situation in the country. Extensive reform of the state-owned financial institutions is needed to make them better conduits of credit to the poor, and reduction of the level of leakage from various food assistance programs is immediately needed.

The Government has recently taken important corrective measures to reduce the budget deficit, and is developing a medium-term macroeconomic framework to move it to a more sustainable level. In addition, a number of specific measures to increase accountability have begun and could be expanded, including use of monitoring tools such as survey-based assessments, public expenditure tracking surveys, and citizen report cards.

Bangladesh is desperately trying to reduce poverty but its climbing population seems to be the barrier preventing it to give a happy face to millions of Bangladeshis. --radeeb (talk) 13:56, 5 October 2008 (UTC)Radeeb

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