Urban poverty on the rise: WB

The number of urban poor in Bangladesh rose about 33 percent to eight million between 1992 and 2010, the World Bank said yesterday.

However, the number of rural poor decreased from 55 million to 46 million during the period, said Ming Zhang, sector manager for urban South Asia at the WB. 

The quality of life of the urban poor is also worse than that of the rural poor, he said in his presentation at the inaugural of a two-day international conference on urban poverty.

The Power and Participation Research Centre (PPRC) and Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) jointly organised the programme in the city's LGED auditorium in partnership with the WB and United Nations Development Programme.

“Typically, they [urban poor] live in slums located on marginal lands. These are overcrowded, lack infrastructure, and have poor quality housing, limited access to services and insecure land tenure,” he said.

“In urban area, you need cash to buy anything,” Ming Zhang said, suggesting a contradiction of the rural areas where they have community life and interconnectedness that come in aid in any social and economic shocks.

The urban poor often face deprivation of education and health services, he said.

This is happening despite the fact that urbanisation is occurring rapidly in the country, and that over 60 percent of the national GDP comes from cities.

According to BBS, urban population in the country will rise to nearly 102 million by 2050, which will be 44 percent of the total population.

Economists and urban experts said policymakers have been focusing on rural poverty over the decades, while urban poverty remained neglected. PPRC Executive Director Hossain Zillur Rahman said the urban poor are the lucrative market for unscrupulous land-grabbers and corrupt politicians and officials who often establish informal housing settlements on disputed public land.

He said there is a political economy, because of which many policy initiatives on public transportation, low-cost housing, urban health and slum improvements see poor progress.

Bringing the social and human face of urban poverty into focus is important because the urban poor, unlike the rural poor, enjoy less residential fixity and often suffer from a reality of being illegal citizens with greater burdens of insecurity and social discrimination, Rahman wrote in an article on the challenges of scaling up the urban focus.

The urban poor, therefore, remain invisible in the statistical systems that tend to favour the formal and residential identity as the basis for statistical inclusion, he said.

The factors that differentiate the urban poor from the rural one also include frequent shift in residence, environmental hazards, social fragmentation, exposure to crimes and violence and accidents, the economist said.

There is also huge income disparity in the cities. For example, households with monthly income below Tk 25,000 constitute 58.4 percent of households in Dhaka but they enjoy an income share of only 21 percent, Rahman said.

In contrast, the top-ranked class with monthly household income above Tk 1 lakh constitutes 5.4 percent of all Dhaka households, but enjoys an income share of 39.9 percent, he added.

Professor Wahiduddin Mahmud demanded the authorities urgently focus on urban poverty, arguing that extreme urban poverty is the worst form of human deprivation in some parts of urban population, which is increasing rapidly.

“In rural areas you have informal insurance and support from community. In urban setting that kind of support is absent,” he said.

Policymakers neglected urban poverty because they thought it is a spillover effect of rural-urban migration, he said.

However, Mahmud said there is a lot of forced migration to urban areas because of natural calamities like river erosion. But, on arrival in urban slums, they find their socio-economic status going down, he added.

Also, in recent times many women workers are moving to the cities, and there is gender discrimination in wages, he said.

Planning Minister AHM Mustafa Kamal in a video message said the government initiated a move to establish 100 economic zones, which will create jobs in rural areas.

Besides, it will upgrade educational and health institutions in rural areas to check massive rural-urban migration.

State Minister for Finance and Planning MA Mannan; Professor David Hulme of the Global Development Institute, University of Manchester; UNDP's International Project Manager John William Tailor and PPRC Senior Fellow Liaquat Ali Choudhury also spoke.