Diarist 24

Diarist 24 in the year to July 2025:
Status: husband, father, household manager Household size: 4 (he. wife, daughter-in-law, and grandchild)
Occupation: sharecropping farmer. Education: none (offspring are educated)
Major assets: house and homestead plot, water pumps, cow(s), sewing machine
Net income year to Jul 2025: 126,280 taka (USD 1,052 PPP$ 3,930, or PPP$ 2.69 per day per person): Income in kind: about 15,000 in the year from farming
End Sep 2024 balances at formal FSPs: Savings 758 taka, Loans 0
main worry about his family, May 2025: my son In Oman was arrested by the police there

Diarist 24 is an older man from a poor uneducated household in Rajshahi District in NW Bangladesh, who came here to seek his fortune some 30 years ago, and married here. Until 2006 he rode a pedal rickshaw, but he became too old for such punishing work. Now he sharecrops on some land near the river and grows bananas, and rears goats and cows on his homestead plot. His wife (like him, illiterate) has a sewing machine and does a lot of dressmaking at home.

They have five sons, all educated to at least primary-pass level. The oldest, who is a driver by occupation, lives in a room in the same house as his father but is married and is not a member of Diarist 24's household.

The other four sons (number 2, 3, 4 and 5) are in Oman. Sons 2 and 4 have been there since before our records start. They are married so their remittances are split between their wives' households and their parents'. Diarist 24's income from remittances has therefore been good but not spectacular.

Son 3 married and left his father's household some time ago but financed his own way to Oman sometime around 2024: he was in some trouble there and has not remitted much. Son number 5 left for Oman in 2023 (hence the payment to the migration agent shown in chart 01).

The wife of the 4th son lives in Diarist 24's household, along with her daughter (see picture).

Chart 01 shows that the household has often been in deficit on a monthly basis, but this is offset in the longer term by occasional larger inflows from cow sales and remittances.

Diarist 24 at home with grandchild

Diarist 24, chart 01. balance

Gifts

In these studies, we habitually distinguish gifts from other kinds of income in order to understand more about how self-sufficient the household is. In the case of Diarist 24 the distinction is somewhat artificial. This is because the household receives two kinds of inflow from the sons overseas: first there are direct remittances from the sons to their parents, which we classify as earned income and are included in the income flows shown in chart 01. But the sons also remit to their wives, and those wives sometimes pass some of that money onto Diarist 24's household. These we classify as gifts, and they are included in chart 02. In chart 02, the apparent fall-off in gifts received from mid-2023 onwards is a mirage due to the fact that the fifth son went overseas, so we started showing his contributions to his parents as remittance income, not as gifts.

Diarist 24 has given many gifts: we recorded 135 of them, but they are mostly of low value (33,000 in total), as pocket-money to grandchildren or contributions to the local mosque. Most are too small to show up on our chart.

Diarist 24, chart 02, gifts

Loans

For some 25 years Diarist 24's wife was a member of MFI BRAC. She took her last, quite small, BRAC loan just after we started tracking them. They repaid on time, but with some difficulty. When the loan officer strongly urged them to take another loan, Diarist 24 objected. They decided to close the account. At the Co-op there is no such pressure and his wife has taken the occasional small loan from that source - in mid 2019 just to get cash to make a howlat to one of her daughters-in-law. They have borrowed and repaid about 70,000 taka at the Co-op. That daughter-in-law, when she was living in Diarist 24's household, had a loan from the MFI TMSS which she was still paying off in the early days of our records.

But since 2020 they have stopped taking loans, partly out of a lack of need for them, partly in order not to be bothered by them. Diarist 24 is getting old.

They also lend, mostly howlats to their family. They lend one son 58,000 to buy a motorbike, and 50,000 to the 4th son when he got into some trouble in Oman.

Diarist 24, chart 03, loans

Savings

It is a similar story with savings. They took back the money saved at BRAC when they closed their account there in 2017. From then on the household was content to accumulate cash surpluses at home. When these reserves grew dangerously large (after they sold a cow for a big sum) they handed 120,000 taka to a son for safekeeping. Then for a few months they drew down on this amount as and when they need edit, and then stopped savings transactions altogether. The wife still has a little money in her Co-op savings account but she is no longer making transactions there.

Diarist 24, chart 04, savings

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