Diarist 16

Diarist 16 in the year to March 2026:
Status: husband, father, household manager Household size: 3 (he, wife, and 1 son: another son and his wife live with them but don't share income)
Occupation: vegetable seller. Education: finished class 7
Major assets: village house and homestead plot
Net income in the year to March 2026: 565,105 taka (USD 4,670 PPP$ 17,660, or PPP$ 16.13 per day per person for the recent 3-person household): Income in kind: none (though they may consume some shop and farm produce)
End Sep 2025 balances at formal FSPs: Savings 56,600 taka, Loans 0
main worry about his family, May 2025: my son is not running our business well

Diarist 16 is an energetic and entrepreneurial character, who came down from a Northern district to work as a labourer on a new bridge crossing the river in Kapasia. Though poor, he had graduated from primary school, and when the bridge job ended he looked for something better. That turned out to be riding a pedal rickshaw, but he didn't like it. Most of all he didn't like the way customers patronised and bullied him. One day a local politician was particularly rude to him and Diarist 16 decided to quit. His friend, a shopkeeper with a shop on a busy crossroads, suggested that Diarist 16 set up a cart selling snacks. 16 had no experience of food preparation, but accepted his friend's view that the spot in front of the shop would be an excellent place for the cart, and his friend's offer of selling him the ingredients on credit. And it was as a snack-seller that he first encountered us and accepted the role of Diarist.

By that time he had married a local woman and had two children. Everyone helped with the business and it prospered. They prepared the snacks at home in the morning and in the evening he sold them from his cart. He took supplies on credit each morning and paid for them when he closed late evening. By 2017 the son was old enough to run the cart when Diarist 16 was in his home village trying to arrange his daughter's marriage and in March 2018 the son set up his own cart. That October Diarist 16 took a lease on a shop inside a private high school and sold snacks and lunches to the pupils. That also went well, but Covid forced it to close, so in late 2020 he went back to selling on the street - this time fresh vegetables - and that is what he is still doing. In recent years he has arranged his son's marriage, bought village homestead land from his brother, and sold a cow raised in the village. See chart 01.

However, family unity has declined recently: by 2025 Diarist 16 was complaining to us that his son was lazy and that the family didn't like the son's wife. Finally the young couple left the Diarist's household in early 2025: they still live in the same place but don't share income.

Diarist 16 preparing snacks

Diarist 16, chart 01, balance

Diarist 16, chart 02, gifts

Gifts (of a sort)

The household is not prolific in giving or receiving gifts, so we show a simplified chart (chart 02). It illustrates the continuing reality of dowry. They got 200,000 taka (in two tranches, of 150,000 followed by 50,000) when the son married, plus some jewellery and furniture. But they gave only 60,000 taka as dowry to the family of their daughter's husband.

Dowries aren't really gifts, though they can be seen as such. They really represent the monetary sealing of the marriage contract between the two households involved. But following local thinking we record them as 'gifts' rather than as income or expenditure. In some circumstances, dowries can be returned should something happen to break the marriage bond. In this case the two couples involved are still together.

Loans

We recorded Diarist 16 taking only 7 loans in the 9 years we have tracked him, perhaps an indication of his independent self-reliant attitude to life. The biggest, of 46,000 taka, was a howlat (an interest-free loan) from his mother, for buying building materials when he was with her in the village. There were two MFI loans, both from Grameen Bank, of 30,000 and 5,000, used for building, and repaid OK. There were more, smaller, howlats from his mother. They were all early on, before Covid. After Covid he took just one modest loan from the Cooperative to help finance the new vegetable-selling business.

But Diarist 16 also gives loans, using the rehan system (see Diarist 10 for an explanation). The biggest rehan transactions we recorded occurred in March 2023 and in July 2025, as his profits from his enterprises grew. These transactions take place at his village home and are done with local landowners there. They give Diarist 16 land to cultivate until the borrower returns the loan in full.

Other than these rehan deals, his loan activity is modest compared with his business turnover, as we se in Chart 3.

Diarist 16, chart 03, loans

Savings

Diarist 16 has been active as a saver, especially after Covid, as we see in chart 04.

In February 2017 Diarist 16 thought that MFI Grameen Bank had paid his wife's compulsory savings account less interest than was due. The discussion got heated. In the end (as Diarist 16 tells it) the Grameen Branch Manager grew angry and cancelled the account. They took out the 22,313 taka of savings. The Manager's version of the story, as told us, was "they don't understand the rules and anyway she doesn't attend the meetings regularly, so we cut her name". They never went back and all their other savings transaction, before and since, have been with the Cooperative, except for deposits into Post Office fixed accounts, such as one of 50,000 taka placed in 3-year account (the PO pays good interest on personal, though not business, accounts).

Up to the end of 2024 we recorded 215,633 taka of deposits into the Coop, often daily for days in a row, mostly in sums of 200 taka but with a good number of bigger ones (many are too small to show up well in the chart). His biggest withdrawal from the Coop was for his son's marriage in 2023 but there have been other big ones , such as 100,000 for his daughters' marriage, and 65,000 withdrawn to make another Post Office deposit. Most recently, July 2025, he took out 50,000 to make his new rehan loan.

The Coop regards him as a shrewd user of his savings account. But it used mainly for personal, not business, reasons.

Diarist 16, chart 04, savings

on to Diarist 17

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