Forty-seven year old Mohammad Munaf Majhi looks 10 years older than his age. His wrinkled face and desperate look suggest that not all is well with him.
“I used to collect green vegetables from farmers in my village, Shingmari,” he said.
Selling the produce on the open-market in Naria, the sub-district headquarters of Bangladesh’s central Shariatpur District, he earned just under US$1.50 a day; a paltry sum, but enough for him to buy rice and `dal’ (pulses) for his 13-year-old daughter Sufia and himself.
“We were happy. There was no want,” Munaf said.
But then came this year’s unusually heavy monsoon rains - impacting over 10 million people in 39 of the country’s 64 districts.
Heavy downpours continued from mid-July till mid-September and much of where Munaf lived was inundated.
“Everything went under muddy flood water. The water stood for two weeks. The mud covered all the paddy and vegetable fields. When the water receded the whole area - from the river bank to the distant horizon - turned into a vast mud field. The vegetable fields disappeared under the mud and so did my fate,” Munaf said.
Munaf’s wife died 13 years ago while giving birth to Sufia, while his 24-year-old son Belayet is married and lives in the district headquarters town of Faridpur with his wife and two children where he works as a day labourer.
Migration to Dhaka - individual testimonies
“I know I have to live and earn for myself and my daughter. So when a group of people from my village left for Dhaka in search of jobs, I decided to join them. I left Sufia in the custody of a close relative. The family will look after her. I will pay for that when I return home,” Munaf said.
Once a vegetable vendor in Naria, Munaf now works as a rickshaw puller in Dhaka. Each morning, he goes out onto the streets of Dhaka with a rickshaw, works until 10 o’clock at night and earns around $2.5 per day. He shares a shack with two of his cousins in the city’s squalid flood protection embankment area, a 17-km long earth-filled barrier around the western and northern fridges of Dhaka, constructed in 1990 to prevent flooding in the area.
“Plying rickshaw is a back-breaking job. But what else can I do?” Munif asked. He hopes one day to save up enough money to return home.
Munaf is not alone in his plight. Each day a stream of migrants from other flood-affected districts arrive in Dhaka; an overcrowded city of over 11 million where unemployment is rife and prospects for a better future are limited.
 Photo: Shamsuddin Ahmed/IRIN  |
| Amena Khatun migrated to Dhaka from Shirajganj in the northwest of the country where she worked as a beggar. Today she begs in Dhaka. |
Rajab Ali is a cobbler. The family did not want to leave their town. Flood waters entered Shirajganj and inundated most parts of the town including their thatched house.
For two weeks the family struggled hard to make a living in Shirajganj, but failed. Inadequate relief and lack of employment drove them to migrate to Dhaka, they explained. Here Rajab Ali works as a cobbler, while Shahara works as a domestic servant and Amena begs.
“There was enough relief material in our town, but not of much use for us. Lots of medicine and warm clothes were distributed. But what do we do with medicine and warm clothes in this scorching heat? They distributed intravenous fluids at a time when we needed only food to fill our bellies,” Amena complained.
“After the floods no one gives alms at Shirajganj. Many well-to-do families do not have enough food for themselves, how would they give us alms?” Amena asked.
Karim Bepari, 52, was a sharecropper at Krishnapur in Atpara, Netrakona District. His family migrated to the capital about 10 days ago where he now works as a day labourer. His wife Sofura, 40, cleans two houses in the city’s Baitul Aman residential area, while their 10-year-old son Nasibuddin is too young to work.
Flood waters washed away his crops twice. The first floods destroyed his crops and the second floods did away with the newly planted seedlings and sealed his fate for the remainder of the year.
His younger brother who arrived in Dhaka before him helped him find work as a day labourer.
Migration to Dhaka “frightening”
While there are no exact figures on the number of flood-affected people migrating to Bangladesh’s largest city, current estimates place their numbers at around 3,000 a day.
“This is in addition to the normal flow of rural to urban migration. This is frightening. Dhaka does not have the space, neither physical nor economic, for so many people,” noted Professor Atiur Rahman of the Department of Development Studies at Dhaka University. “If the flow continues for more than a month we should prepare ourselves to face a catastrophe in human terms,” he warned.
Echoing that sentiment, Abdus Sattar Bhuiyan, a senior economist of the Bangladesh Planning Commission, called for better long-term planning for the creation of attractive jobs at the district and sub-district levels.
“We cannot stop people from coming to Dhaka when they do not have any jobs in their local areas. It is not the beauty of Dhaka city that attracts them, [but] rather the absence of a means of survival in the rural and semi-urban regions that drive them here,” Bhuiyan explained.
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This article was produced by IRIN News while it was part of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Please send queries on copyright or liability to the UN. For more information: https://shop.un.org/rights-permissions
