October 27, 2003	Monday	Sha’aban 30, 1424

DHAKA: Some northern districts of Bangladesh have recently been exposed to an acute famine-like situation with a few million poor and landless people starving due to a lack of jobs and a severe scarcity of food, reported a Dhaka-based daily ‘New Age’ on Sunday.

“About 40 per cent of the total population of the six districts of North Bengal — Rangpur, Dinajpur, Nilphamari, Kurigram, Lalmonirhat, Panchagarh and Gaibandha — are struggling to manage even one full meal a day for themselves,” the report says. “Communities on the banks of the rivers Dharla, Teesta and Brahmaputra and their adjacent villages are worst hit by the famine, locally called ‘monga’.”

The monga is a yearly occurrence in the area that strikes with the completion of the Aman plantation in early September. The populace, purely dependent on agricultural activities, go jobless till the Aman is harvested in early November. Living a hand-to-mouth existence around the year and having no savings to fall back on, thousands of families go destitute during these times of zero income, and literally live off whatever they can scrape off their surroundings.

In Hemerkuthi village under Halokhana union in Kurigram, a poor man, Miren, could not remember the last time he, his wife and their two-year-old child had rice. “This time every year we become jobless and don’t earn enough to buy rice,” he was quoted to have said.

Thousands of jobless people of the region are reportedly surviving on once-daily rations of plantain stems and arums.

Meanwhile, more than a million have reportedly been affected with diarrhoea in the last two months, mostly for eating otherwise inedible and unhygienic food. All the hospitals of the districts, including the Sadar Hospital, were flooded with diarrhoea patients last week.