The name of the village is Modhurkhola (Place of Honey). It is under Dohar upazila -60 km south west of the capital city. The headmaster of the village high school said that the village was so named as fields filled with mustard plants and trees around used to tempt bees to produce honey - long, long ago. We could guess well that the bees are no more there but the honey still flows in terms of money from abroad.
In the village, 60 per cent of the households have only homesteads and another 20 per cent have land up to 50 decimals. In other words, four-fifths of households are landless households. The average size of owned land is pitifully low at 50 decimals. Rich farmers with five acres and more lands are almost non-existent for which the tenancy market remains thin. Boro rice is grown in the winter; not much of other crops are cultivated.
However, the people of Modhurkhola are fortunate on more than one count. In the 1970s and 1980s, it used to take them eight hours to reach Dhaka via motor launch. Now they can commute to the capital city four times a day. The huge mobility owes a great deal to the Dhaka-Mawa highway, the bridges over Buriganga and the link roads between the village and other places.
In the past decades, 60 per cent of the houses were made of muddy floors and straw roofs (huts), 10-15 per cent shaky tin-sheds, and 20 per cent pucca or semi-pucca structures. With the passage of time, however, the pendulum has swung sharply to account for 60 per cent pucca buildings, 30 per cent tin sheds with pucca floor, and 10 per cent only tin sheds.
In the past, majority of households could hardly have two satisfactory meals a day whereas there is hardly any household now with that hardship. Most of the poor labour class in those days used to migrate to other districts to eke out a living by working in others' fields. Now most of the labourers in this village come from other places to plant and harvest crops. The agricultural wage rate is Tk. 300/day plus three meals. Once agriculture was the backbone of the village's economy but now the sector has taken a back seat. The per capita income in the village has soared from below $100 (Tk 8,000) to nearly $900 (Tk 72,000) - an enviable improvement indeed!
To have a look at the factors behind the transformation, one day we arrived there. Beautiful buildings on both sides of the pucca road running through the village amazed us. Some of them are 2-3 storied with flats to be rented out. We were also bemused by the costly architectural designs of the houses. The rickshaw-pullers or the agricultural labour class that we came across, come from other parts of the country. How could one explain the transformation when agricultural income constitutes only one-tenth of household income in the
village?
As we saw in other villages, and in a regime of acute land scarcity, infrastructural development such as roads, irrigation, human capital etc. paved the way towards the progress (positive transformation) through expansion of non-farm activities, spread of modern varieties, access road and electricity etc. None of these, however, could be attributed to the rise in per capita income and standard of living over time.
As it could be learnt from oral history, the 'honey' for the residents of Modhurkhola now flows from foreign remittances. Two-thirds of the households have at least one member sending remittances from abroad and 10 per cent receive from domestic sources.
It was in the early 1980s that a villager, desperate to come out of poverty, went to Saudi Arabia overcoming many problems. But after landing there, he didn't forget his fellows at home, and established social networks to help a few more to migrate. Those few in turn helped more to migrate, and this worked like a magic. Does it mean that those who once lived in huts have moved to the tin sheds and those in tin sheds have shifted to the buildings? The headmaster explained, "No Sir, the larger proportion of those living in buildings now had huts in the past. It is because a large number of the migrants from this village hailed from the huts. They seized upon the opportunity of migration by mortgaging or selling land, taking help from others in and around and, most importantly, the migrants abroad extended their helping hands to them. The members of solvent and the rich class have also migrated but not as many as the poor ones".
As the men have gone abroad, roughly half of the households in Modhurkhola are female-led. Modhura (not the real name) is one such head of a landless family. Her husband, educated up to eighth grade and working as wielder, went abroad in 1996. He had no land excepting the homestead but received a lot of help from others to migrate. The total cost of migration at that time was Tk 2,50,000. Since 1996, her husband remitted, on an average, Tk 25,000 a month and the accumulated amount now stands at Tk 4.3 million. The cost of the migration was recovered within one year of the job. Modhura has now savings of Tk 2,00,000 in a bank, loans to others Tk 50,000 and gold worth Tk 20,000. In the meantime, the house has been repaired and she has already started building a pucca house. The purpose of her savings is to buy land - the dream of a landless household.
The remittances have also produced other ripples such as a reduction in the growth rate of population, lowering household size at less than four, better health and sanitation, improved enrolment in schools, availability of mobile phones, TV sets etc. It is thus no wonder that two-thirds of the poor households of that particular village rank themselves as rich/solvent compared to others in the village. Poverty in Modhurkhola is no more confined to calorie intake. A different kind of deprivation is developing such as craze for buildings, colour TVs, sophisticated mobile phones etc.
But all that glitters may not be gold. Remittances have also produced reverse swings. This has been revealed from our discussions with the people of surrounding villages where remittance has taken over rice economy. In Dohar upazila, early marriages (up to 17 years) of girls in the migrant villages are reported to be as high as 15-20 per cent. Both boys and girls are not serious in their studies. The former think that school-level certificate is enough to migrate abroad while the latter find that earning male migrants are ready to marry them.
There is another serious problem - out of 100 couples, five get divorced, and roughly 15-20 indulge in immoral and scandalous activities. Thus the social cost is huge that rarely finds a berth in the calculus of foreign remittances. The huge dependence on remittance income (three-fourths of total) could also become a recipe for disaster in the wake of a global economic crisis, particularly affecting the Middle East and Singapore. Remitted money then might turn out to be bitter honey. Until then, good luck!  Â
The writer is a Professor of Economics at Jahangirnagar University.
abdulbayes@yahoo.com
Of money and honey
Abdul Bayes | Published: September 02, 2014 00:00:00 | Updated: November 30, 2024 06:01:00
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