25m families benefit from TCB’s OMS programme

The number of beneficiaries under the open market sale (OMS) operation has risen significantly as the Covid-19 pandemic forced people on low incomes to buy commodities at subsidised rates.
The state-owned Trading Corporation of Bangladesh (TCB) sells sugar, edible oil, gram, lentil, dates and onion through trucks and dealers in parts of the country.
According to commerce ministry, nearly 60-million people have benefited from the OMS while the number of beneficiaries has been hovering around 30 million in the last couple of years.
As many as 25-million families are being benefited from the popular OMS programme as of April 2020.
The OMS operation helps keep the prices of key essential items stable in the market and offset the living cost of lower-income people, according a document of the ministry.
The state agency sells key commodities with an eye to keeping their prices within the purchasing power of commoners.
The OMS programme is specially operated ahead of the holy month of Ramadan every year to stabilise the kitchen prices and keep market manipulators at bay.
Some 59.4-million people benefited in fiscal year (FY) 2019-20 from 37,106 TCB trucks and general allocations to the TCB-listed dealers concerned.
The TCB has taken necessary measures for adequate supply of the items in the market in the fasting month," said an official who deals with the issue.
The government's agencies concerned are closely monitoring the supply and price movements so that manipulators cannot create any artificial crisis in the kitchen market, according to the official.
Usually, the people who live in the low-income bracket suffer a lot due to an unusual hike in the prices of key essential items during Ramadan and Eid.
However, the TCB has long been facing capital shortages and borrowing from banks to procure essentials for market intervention, said an official of the agency.
The government has been supplying funds to purchase key commodities during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic across the country, he added.
The TCB primarily intervenes the market when prices of essential goods go up in the open market.
The government has provided substantial subsidies, including interest, to the TCB to date, he added.
The government had provided about Tk 3.76 billion in subsidies from FY 2010-11 to FY 2015-16, according to the state entity.
However, experts do not want to give much credit to the TCB for what they say no impact of market intervention despite OMS operation in the country.
The entity has already started open market sale of goods from the beginning of April.
The OMS programme will continue countrywide until May 06, says a TCB statement.

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