SHAHABAZPUR (Bangladesh): Shefali Begum goes to bed many nights hungry because there is nothing left after feeding her four children and husband. But the frail mother, one of millions of poor Bangladeshi women who toil from dawn to dusk, is not complaining.

“We are a poor family. I am used to it,” said the 40-year-old wife of a farm labourer who earns 100 taka ($1.5) a day in a farming village 200 km east of the capital Dhaka.

There are other women even less fortunate.

Thousands have been abandoned by their husbands because they were unable to provide adequate wedding dowry, while many others are tortured or smuggled abroad by traffickers. Many of these women are lured with the promise of jobs but end up as prostitutes.

Bangladesh Prime Minister Begum Khaleda Zia and leader of the opposition Sheikh Hasina are both women who between them have ruled the impoverished South Asian country for the past 15 years.

But despite promises to ensure equal rights, education, jobs, very little has changed for women, particularly in villages where 80 per cent of the Muslim-majority country’s 140 million people live.

“I am born to live in poverty,” said Shefali’s neighbour Masuma in Shahabazpur village which is threatened by floods almost each year from the Meghna river that flows close by.

“As a child I had dreams. Before marriage I had hopes. But as a wife and mother I see both my dreams and hopes have evaporated,” she said.

Most of Shahabazpur’s 1,000 families live on farming, though many have no land of their own. They work in others’ fields and their homes are crumbling tin-roofed structures.

DECEIVED: Women, experts say, bear the brunt of the poverty.

“They are deprived of equal rights within and outside families. They suffer atrocities and injustice at all levels,” said Shirin Akhtar, president of Karmajibi Nari, a group representing working women.

Each year at least 5,000 women are divorced because their husbands want to take another wife, rights groups say adding there are many more cases that go unreported.

Another 300 suffer acid attacks from jilted lovers or because of family fueds, women groups say.

And an estimated 10,000 women are smuggled out by agents promising them jobs in India, but they instead end up in the red-light districts of Bombay and Calcutta. Others are shipped to Pakistan.

Female activists say that a promised empowerment of women in Bangladesh has largely remained elusive, and even in politics their presence is marginal despite the rise of Khaleda and Hasina.

The country’s 300-member parliament has only seven elected women legislators — including Khaleda and Hasina. The government has decided to reserve 45 seats for women, but activists say it wouldn’t help much because these positions will be filled by appointment, instead of an election.

They said these hand-picked women would just be a “showpiece” without any real powers, and beholden to their political mentors.

But a government minister said women may not yet be ready for the hurly burly of an election, especially those who live in the villages.

“We are not against election of women but we think a gradual integration of women in politics is better in our context,” Law and Parliamentary Affairs Minister Barrister Moudud Ahmed said.

Despite generations of backwardness, Bangladeshi women have made some notable progress in various fields over the past decade, including education and business.—Reuters