Another 1.84 crore people have been added to the poverty line in the country, according to BIDS
BIDS estimates that in the second quarter of the year, 16.4 million people in the country have been newly added to the poverty line due to the impact of Kovid-19. In this situation, it will not be possible to achieve the poverty reduction targets set by the government. Besides, the income of urban workers decreased by 60 percent and the income of rural workers decreased by 10 percent during the Kovid period.
This information was given in a webinar of Bangladesh Development Research Organization (BIDS) on Wednesday.
Binayad Sen, Senior Research Fellow at BIDS, said in the BIDS Critical Conversations Webinar titled 'In the Shadow of Covid Coping, Adjustment, Response' that short or long term partial or complete lockdown is not economically viable to offset the effects of Covid-19. This has increased the poverty rate, on the other hand, has made the lives of those who were poor before Kovid miserable.
Binayak Sen further said that this loss cannot be compensated by increasing the allocation in the social security sector. There will be no profit even if the allocation is increased, because there is a tendency in the country to select the wrong people in providing these allowances and assistance. As a result, many of those who need it cannot get on the list. It has been found that the number of poor and affluent people in the distribution of various social security allowances is 30 per cent, in the case of food aid it is 32 per cent, in the case of maternity allowance 44 per cent, in the case of scholarships 33 per cent.
Binayak Sen said the impact of Kovid would reduce the rate of poverty alleviation in the country, adding that it would make it difficult to achieve the SDG target of poverty alleviation by 2030. In this situation, in order to reduce the health expenditure of the individual, the allocation in this sector should be increased from 2.5 percent to 3 percent of the GDP. At the same time, the government needs to follow a more egalitarian model