Climate-affected Bangladesh people pushed to acute poverty

[Banana]

About 600 families of Shulkia village were compelled to seek shelter in other places. Most of these families migrated to Chittagong port city

Climate change induced displaced people have been recently taking shelters on the embankment in Patenga and Halishahar of Chittagong port city, after losing their homesteads and lands due to climate extreme events like tidal surge and erosion.

Reduced to extreme poverty, nearly 50 families had taken shelter on the embankment in last six months. During a recent visit to the locality, this correspondent was told by Nahida Akhter, 30, temporally living on the embankment in Halishahar, that once she had a happy family with a house at Charbhavat in South Hatia.

She said: “We lost our home due to erosion of the Meghna two years ago and were compelled to move to Chittagong city looking for shelter.”

Nahida said as they have no relatives in the port city, she and her husband with three children took shelter on the embankment and are living there in acute poverty for last two years.

Mohammad Shahed Ali, 30, who recently migrated to Chittagong port city from Hatia Upazila in Noakhali, said the erosion of the Meghna River claimed his homestead few days ago. He said he had a house in Shulkia village of Charking union and the entire village was devoured by the Meghna erosion during this year. About 600 families of Shulkia village were compelled to seek shelter in other places. Most of these families migrated to Chittagong port city.

As Bangladesh is facing the adverse impacts of extreme climate events, including cyclone, tidal surge, erosion, flood and erratic rainfall, migration rate from rural to urban areas has been increasing day by day. Most of the people are migrating from islands and char areas to other places in the country, particularly in cities and towns.

About the recent trend of migration of displaced people, Sunil Chandra Das, who took shelter on the Patenga-Halishahar embankment nearly 30 years back after losing his house due to a tidal surge, said that when he migrated to Chittagong city from an island of the Bay of Bengal, only few families used to live on the coastal embankment. “But, now thousands of internally migrated people are living on the embankment after losing their homesteads due to natural disasters,” he said.

Locals said some 4,000 displaced people of over 1,000 families currently live on the coastal embankment of Chittagong, which creates immense economic pressure in the area. Without adequate livelihood options, most of these families live under the poverty line.

According to experts, Bangladesh is frequently visited by natural disasters such as tropical cyclones, storm surges, floods, droughts, tornadoes, and nor’westers. Of these, tropical cyclones originating in the Bay of Bengal and associated storm surges are the most disastrous.

Sea level rise, an increase in cyclone intensity, and consequent increases in storm surge heights will have disastrous effects on the deltaic country, which will force the people to migrate to urban areas in the coming days, adding to the number of people living below the poverty rate.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), if the sea level will rise one meter due to global warming by 2050, the country’s one-third of land will go under the sea water.

M Jahirul Huq, Town Manager, Chittagong, of UNDP Urban Partnerships for Poverty Reduction Programme, said a significant number of people will be displaced from the coastal belt due to global warming in future and they will migrate to the urban areas. This will intensify the urban poverty in the coming days. “So, the government should take a comprehensive policy to address the issue of internally migrated people as well as urban poverty,” he said. agencies

Daily Times - Leading News Resource of Pakistan

Poverty in Bangladesh will Increase as Water Level Rises According to Pakistani Experts.

 

[kobiraaz]

Few days ago i was watching Al jazeera and they showed a rail line where people were defecating in lines.... almost 30 people together..... Guess which country that was??

 

[Icewolf]

Few days ago i was watching Al jazeera and they showed a rail line where people were defecating in lines.... almost 30 people together..... Guess which country that was??

Maybe thats why Indian trains go so fast... The poop and piss the Indians defect on their railways is enough to accelerate the trains

 

[Banana]

Few days ago i was watching Al jazeera and they showed a rail line where people were defecating in lines.... almost 30 people together..... Guess which country that was??

There was a Picture of a Train circulating where Muslims had enroached on the train in such a way that the train was not visible and that was called India, but turned out to be Bangladeshis on a Eid travel.

Guess Al Jazeera wouldn't want to bastardize itself by showing Kuffars. They were Bangladeshi Muslims.

 

[kobiraaz]

There was a Picture of a Train circulating where Muslims had enroached on the train in such a way that the train was not visible and that was called India, but turned out to be Bangladeshis on a Eid travel.

Guess Al Jazeera wouldn't want to bastardize itself by showing Kuffars. They were Bangladeshi Muslims.

no thats Iztema the largest religious gathering after Hajj! people crawl to attend that let alone trains! ....... It is in my town, i cant travel home from dhaka during those days, because the road from Dhaka To Gazipur becomes full of people trying to join the gathering...anyway nice try!

 

[kobiraaz]

[/IMG]

 

[Alchemy]

Nuff of mud slinging , but the truth remains that climate change is going to push a lot of people away from heavily populated coastal areas and further inland , thus cramping the inland more and putting more pressure on land n resources among many other complications !

 

[kobiraaz]

I am posting the article without reading it, dont know whats written, but as it was written by a foreigner it must be neutral

Bishwa Ijtema: five million Muslims, 108 weddings, one Australian female photographer

On 24 January 2010 I attended the final day of Bishwa Ijtema, or “World Congregation.” If you’re not Muslim you may not have heard of it – it’s an annual Islamic congregation held by the banks of the Turag River in Tongi, which is about 20 kilometres from Dhaka, Bangladesh. Devotees from 70 different countries spent three days in prayer and meditation and Islamic scholars delivered sermons. The organisers, Tablighi Jamaat, forbid political discussions taking place and the congregation is officially open to people from all faiths. As per tradition, mass dowry-free wedding ceremonies were held on the second day of Ijtema. According to The Daily Star, this year 108 couples were married in a single day. That’s a lot of love (or persuasion).

Bishwa Ijtema (pronounced biz-wah ist-emah) began very humbly in 1946, when an Indian scholar met with a few people at a local mosque. In 2010, local police estimated that the numbers of devotees reached five million.

I was really excited about witnessing such a huge event. I contacted a photographer called Jeremy Hunter, who was coming to Bangladesh for a week to take pictures for The Guardian. We met up in Coffee World a few days before to discuss our plans. Jeremy had maps and photos from previous years and suggested we do a warm-up lap of Tongi the following day. Such a level of preparedness was unknown to me – but I have learnt from it. We went with Jeremy’s 70-year-old fixer called “Tiger Uncle” who showed us the train station and we scanned for good vantage points. How we would ever reach those points in the midst of millions remained a mystery to me. We met a friendly member of the Special Branch Police who said he’d find out if I could take a photo of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina (impossible).

But the night before I suffered pre-ijtema jitters. Due to the incredible swell of traffic, Jeremy had arranged to travel to Tongi on the back of a motorcycle. Some of my colleagues told me that going alone would be difficult, and others said that devotees might not be receptive to a female western photographer. Unfortunately, by this stage it was too late to team up with a reporter from The Daily Star. If I had a taka for every time I was told to cover my hair… By midnight on Saturday I had decided to go, but to turn around and come back if I felt uncomfortable (or was making others uncomfortable).

However ijtema turned out to be one of the best experiences of my life. It was extraordinary to see so many people come together to celebrate their identity and faith. The last two ‘mass’ events I attended were the protests against the G20 summit in London, and before that, the protests on the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. The mood during those two occasions was (justifiably) one of anger, frustration and bitterness. Ijtema felt joyful, whilst also solemn and reflective.

And as for the mixed reports about whether devotees would be receptive to a western woman taking photographs – I found them positively encouraging. In fact there was so much waving, posing and posturing – even direct requests to take individual and group portraits – that my only difficulty was getting candid shots. I took nearly 700 photos, and only once did someone ask me not to take his picture (which was a bit silly, because he was one of hundreds on the banks below the bridge). However I didn’t try to enter the central prayer area as I felt that would be pushing my luck.

It was also a physically demanding experience – my whole body ached the next day. After giving up on the CNG (auto-rickshaw) around 9am when traffic came to a standstill (after pumping myself up by listening to the very un-Islamic sounds of WHAM) I walked with thousands of others for a couple of hours to reach the ijtema grounds, which are spread over 160 acres. We crossed soft sand, mud and waist-deep water. Moving around in the congregation was obviously difficult and at the beginning there was a massive crush that nearly scared me off the whole idea. But a man stretched his arms out around me to give me breathing room, and this act of kindness was repeated by many others throughout the day. After asking for directions to Tongi train station, a man in white robes and skullcap planted himself by my side and became my temporary fixer. He spent 45 minutes escorting me to the train station, telling officials I was a “sanbadik” (journalist) and I was allowed to pass through various hurdles – alas only to be turned back by police who had temporarily blocked off the station. When I went to a partially constructed multi-storey building to get a good vantage point while waiting for Akheri Munajat (the final prayer) to begin, he smiled and disappeared back into the crowd.

It was mostly women who had gathered on various levels of the building. A man made me a seat out of planks of wood and I read Shazia Omar’s “Like a Diamond in the Sky” while eating mandarins and enjoying the shade. It was a happy coincidence of art imitating life when I came to this passage:

“As they walked, Deen realised he was not surrounded by people, people, people but men, men, men. Men everywhere. The street was clogged with men. Men chanting Allah. Men dressed in robes inching forward with Qurans and religious zeal. White robes billowed in the wind like spectres. Even for Bangladesh, with 150 million people squeezed into 150 square miles of land, this congregation was an especially cramped mess.”

It compounded the feeling that ijtema is the biggest thing ever.

However when I came home and did some research, I found that ijtema is dwarfed by the world’s largest peaceful gathering, which was held in Allahabad, India, in 2007. Between 60 and 70 million showed up for the month-long Kumbh Mela, which takes place every 12 years.

Wikipedia’s list of ‘largest peaceful gatherings in history’ does not claim to be comprehensive (and it omits ijtema altogether), but according to its contents, Bishwa Ijtema 2010 was the tenth largest peaceful gathering in history.

Because I’m talking about silly, almost incomprehensible numbers of humans, here are some examples of other mass events to put it into context:

Around six million people welcomed Ayatollah Khomeini in Tehran, Iran when he returned from exile following the Islamic Revolution in 1979. Twice as many people attended his funeral a decade later.
Around 1.8 million people attended the inauguration of Barack Obama in Washington in January 2009, but that was a million less than the parade in Boston celebrating the Red Sox’s baseball match victory in 2004. The win ended the team’s 86 year “Curse of the Bambino” of world series championship losses.
In 2007, one million people attended the Love Parade in Essen, Germany.
400,000 people attended Woodstock in New York state 1969, the largest rock concert of the decade. Here’s a quote from an online BBC report: “The festival’s chief medical officer, Dr William Abruzzi told Rolling Stone magazine: ‘These people are really beautiful. There has been no violence whatsoever which is really remarkable for a crowd of this size.’”
Up to three million people attended the hajj in Mecca late last year. Itjema is frequently labelled as “the second largest congregation of Muslims after the hajj.” This is incorrect – it is number one. Of course it’s not a competition but I do find this interesting, because it is not compulsory for all able-bodied Muslims to take part in ijtema, whereas the hajj is compulsory at least once in a lifetime for those who can afford it.

Why ijtema receives so little coverage in the world press is a mystery. Happily for me though, after a four hour journey home which involved walking, more walking, a bullock cart and a taxi, I sold two pictures to AFP.

Bishwa Ijtema: five million Muslims, 108 weddings, one Australian female*photographer « Jessica Mudditt's Blog

 

[LaBong]

Few days ago i was watching Al jazeera and they showed a rail line where people were defecating in lines.... almost 30 people together..... Guess which country that was??

Which report, I'm a regular reader of al jazeera, didn't come across any such report.

Defecation in open is a Bangladeshi problem as well, although they do it in open fields while trying to get their lungis in order.

 

[alaungphaya]

BD should bite the bullet and adopt a one child policy. Is there a word in your language for contraception?

 

[UKBengali]

BD should bite the bullet and adopt a one child policy. Is there a word in your language for contraception?

BD's population growth rate is now a shade over 1%.

It is less than India.

Please do some research before opening your mouth in future as you seem to be highly ignorant.

 

[alaungphaya]

If there weren't so many of you, the rest of the world wouldn't need to be accommodating your population spillovers. It'll only get worse when your coastal regions start sinking into the ocean. Your government needs to stop you people breeding so much.

 

[UKBengali]

If there weren't so many of you, the rest of the world wouldn't need to be accommodating your population spillovers. It'll only get worse when your coastal regions start sinking into the ocean. Your government needs to stop you people breeding so much.

You obviously did not digest my last post, did you?

Your anti-Muslim/BD hatred if there for all to see.

 

[alaungphaya]

Ah you're just easy to wind up.

 

[clmeta]

Sounds good. Can you give me a link?
Also, Bangladesh is one of the densest populated countries of the world.
I can't believe it had greater population than West Pakistan in 1971.
But yes population growth rate is coming down which is good for India.
Also, economy of Bangladesh is also improving which is another good news.

BD's population growth rate is now a shade over 1%.

It is less than India.

Please do some research before opening your mouth in future as you seem to be highly ignorant.