From YubaNet.com

12 March 2008

Rural poor flee to Dhaka

Mohammad Anwar Ali had never travelled beyond Satkhira District, southwestern Bangladesh , but then he never had to. In Aat Ghoria, a tiny village on the outskirts of Satkhira town, he was content living with his parents, wife and three children.

That all changed last November, when Cyclone Sidr devastated large parts of the country's coastal area, devastating agricultural land, killing over 3,000 and rendering millions more homeless.

"I knew it would take days for relief to come. The kids would not survive till that time. So, on the second day, I bade goodbye to my kids, wife and parents and set out for Dhaka . There are jobs for us in Dhaka . We could peddle rickshaws, draw carts and work on construction sites," Ali said.

Ali was not alone in this belief, with scores of cyclone survivors moving to the capital to do exactly the same thing, taking up whatever jobs they could to provide for their families.

Trying to escape hunger

There are tens of thousands of people like Ali today thronging the streets of Dhaka ; a fast expanding mega-city reeling under the pressure of over 10 million inhabitants.

With a very small job market and barely any scope for self-employment, rural people are swelling the ranks of the city's economic migrants.

But it is not just cyclone victims that are migrating to the nation's largest metropolis in an effort not to go hungry. Many come from impoverished areas of the country, especially northern districts.

Lack of data

Yet despite their numbers, the plight of such migrants and the true scale of the problem remains largely unknown. In fact, the government does not maintain any records on their numbers, nor do Dhaka authorities have a real grasp of how many people are arriving from the countryside daily.

"Rural-urban migration is a continuous process and has been taking place since the dawn of civilisation," noted Atiur Rahman, chairman of the Department of Development Studies at Dhaka University , and an eminent economist.

"Cities offer various sources of earning both for skilled and unskilled people. There isn't much opportunity in the villages other than agriculture, fisheries and livestock raising. With the introduction of modern equipment, machinery and labour-saving technologies, these sectors do not need many people. Modernisation of agriculture is shrinking the rural job market. That is why people are rushing to the cities," he explained.

But Rahman also saw a positive element in today's migration.

With cyclone relief operations in full swing and a vulnerable group feeding programme providing assistance for the next three months, it is primarily women, children and elderly people that are living on relief now, he said.

"The young are coming to the cities, which mean these people do not want to live on government doles [handouts]. They want jobs, not relief. Who will create jobs for them is another matter though," he said.

Full article is available here