The government faces a challenge in reaching the target population in need of financial assistance amid the Covid pandemic in the absence of a comprehensive database of poor people.
To store basic information of all citizens, a Cabinet Division committee in November last year sent a proposal to the Prime Minister s Office for having a separate authority that will provide services relating to National Identity (NID) cards.
However, the proposal has been lying with the PMO for more than four months. We are yet to get any feedback from the Prime Minister s Office…, Cabinet Division Additional Secretary Sultan Ahmed, the chief of the committee, told The Daily Star recently.
Over the last couple of weeks, Abdus Sobhan, a day labourer in the capital, saw his earnings drop to almost nothing.
With the government-imposed restrictions taking effect on April 14, the 40-year-old man, who crushes bricks and moves soil at construction sites, could hardly manage any work to make a living.
With very little income and no help around, he is worried about his survival in the city in the coming days as the government extended the restrictions till May 5. I have my elderly parents at my village home to look after. But if I cannot earn, how would I feed my family? Sobhan, who has been living in a slum in the city s Mirpur area for nearly seven years, told this newspaper yesterday.
The government project undertaken to prepare the country s first-ever poverty registry has not been completed in more than seven years, with the data collected for it already rendered useless.
The National Household Database (NHD), initially known as the Bangladesh Poverty Database, is meant to help streamline the beneficiary selection process for social safety net programmes by gathering socioeconomic data of each household in the country.
Implemented in collaboration between the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) and the Department of Disaster Management (DDM), the project beginning in 2013 was supposed to be completed by 2017.
But the Tk 328 crore project, financed by the government and the World Bank, saw its deadline pushed to June 2021 and cost balloon to Tk 727 crore.
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Covid Pandemic: Earnings of low-income people drop by 66pc
Says a survey
Bagful of vegetables being distributed for free among locals in TSC area of Dhaka University yesterday amid the ongoing restrictions imposed to curb the spread of the coronavirus. The initiative was taken by the Dhaka South City Corporation authorities. Photo: Anisur Rahman
Staff Correspondent
Staff Correspondent
The ongoing Covid-19 crisis has been taking a heavy toll on low-income groups as they have been facing income losses and taking out loans to cope with the pandemic fallout.
While the second wave is sweeping across the nation even before the affects of the first are fully recovered from, low-income people, including day-labourers, rickshaw-pullers, and roadside hawkers, are facing the real struggle of the ongoing restrictions on travelling and office activities widely known as a lockdown , said a research published yesterday.