Went to visit the four slum areas where the survey is being conducted by a team of investigators. First was Begunbari Pataton Bosti, Tejgaon.
This building contains 120 one-room households on three shakily constructed floors. The people live here worry constantly about it collapsing. There is a dispute between the landlord and the government over who owns this land, which could result in eviction. They pay around Tk. 1300 per month rent (£10), which per square metre is around 5 times as much as middle class families pay in Dhaka.
This girl went to a kindergarten (private) school, where fees were Tk. 3000 (£23) to register plus Tk. 150 (£1) per month.
Some of the rooms were too dark to fill in the survey - there had been a power cut since the previous day.
Lalbag Bosti
This slum was originally set up as a "sweeper colony" - people were invited to migrate from India to work as street sweepers. The housing was a combination of tin shacks and a much better 5-storey concrete building.
Some of the people here had relatively high incomes - around Tk. 8-10,000 (£60-80) per month for a family with two earners. This woman's husband was working in Malaysia and sending home money. Most of the children were going to school.
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2 comments:
Hi Stuart, How do they react to you as a white man coming into their houses?
They didn't seem to react very strongly to my presence -- neither hostile nor fawning, and not even particularly curious. One woman gave up her chair for me -- typical Bangladeshi hospitality -- I refused to take it and she also refused to sit back down so we were just standing there for a moment. I left as soon as I could so that she could sit down and the interviewer could get on with the survey. Colleagues explained who I was and what I was doing there which helped a lot. They may have experience of other researchers coming to the slums. They were happy to have their photos taken and very keen to tell my colleagues about the problems of living there.
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