Abstract

PIP: This 1st part of the discussion of the poverty in Bangladesh reviews efforts on the part of individuals, donor agencies, and the government to alleviate poverty, and some goals of the new Third Five Year Plan. More than 3/4 of the people of Bangladesh live in poverty or close to it, according to development and economic criteria. Bangladesh society has hardly any parallel in the world if viewed from the perspective of its capacity, like a biological species, to adapt to an ecological niche and then reproduce to fill that niche. This defines success in biological terms. The Bangladesh society that developed was highly in tune with the natural environment of the rice growing plains. Social organization, kinship, settlement pattern, economic transactions, beliefs systems, and reproductive biology all developed in close symbiosis with the land. From a humanitarian perspective, Bangladesh is also highly successful. The human interaction, the expressive culture, the fullness of life, and the verbal arts all are more fully expressed than in many cultures. By "development" criteria, Bangladesh appears highly unsuccessful. Per capita income is about $130 a year. Bangladesh ranks very low in such indices as literacy, housing, roads, health services, infant survival, loan recovery, exportable goods, and control of the population growth rate. There is no question but that individuals usually are well aware if their situation is precarious, and they take rational action to improve their security; the government and private agencies have a multitude of programs aimed at alleviating poverty. For Bangladesh as a whole, domestic savings in 1984-85 was 8%, and during the Second Five Year Plan the rate of domestic savings increased faster than was expected, compared with income. Almost all the nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), many bilateral donor agencies, and huge segments of government target their efforts to the poor and the small farmers. There are over 150 NGOs of substantial size in Bangladesh, besides many local ones. A 1985 survey of NGO programs to help the poor save and invest found that they have been successful generally in improving the economic condition of the target people. In comparison with the private agencies, government programs to reach small farmers and the poor tend not to work as well because they suffer from the pervasive malaise that affects almost all such attempts through the bureaucracy. Yet, the success they have achieved, as in raising agricultural productivity, accounts in significant measure for the economic stability of the country to date. The key goals of the country to date. The key goals of the Third Five Year Plan are: annual economic growth of 5.4%; reduction of annual population growth to 1.8%; and by the end of the plan raising at least 10% of the rural poor above the poverty line.