Diarist 27

Diarist 27 in the year to July 2025:
Status: husband, father, household manager Household size: 6 (he, wife, son, 3 daughters)
Occupation: hospital orderly, businessman. Education: grade 10 (wife grade 12)
Major assets: house & homestead land, 1 acre farmland, small urban plot with building
Net income year to Jul 2025: 555,346 taka (USD 4,628 PPP$ 17,284, or PPP$ 7.89per day per person): Income in kind: about 18,000 in the year from consumption of own farming produce
End Sep 2024 balances at formal FSPs: Savings 188,730 taka, Loans 1,031,251
main worry about his family, May 2025: the heavy debts after paying for my daughter's expensive nurse training

Diarist 27 comes from a small farming family, not rich, and was educated up to class ten. He inherited a home and homestead land, and just over an acre of farmland, which he normally share-crops out. As a young man he went to Singapore and worked there for five years. He married a woman from a similar background but with even more schooling and they both managed to get government jobs as orderlies or general workers in government hospitals. Though these are low-grade ("4th class employees") the pay is good compared to that of other Diarists and the security, along with pensions and other benefits, are a boon. He is also very good at extracting tips from patients he helps to get appointments. All this helped him use his abundant energy and ambition to explore several money-making schemes as sidelines. Much of this is aimed at giving good educations to their three daughters (born 2003, 2008 and 2013).

Soon after we started with him, he bought land (we'll see how he financed it later), planning to build a new home (for future use, since they lived in subsidized housing provided by the hospital). At the same time (early 2016), after spending much of the previous year training and getting a trade license, he opened a medicine shop in rented space directly opposite the government hospital in nearby Torgaon and in due course (2018) got himself transferred to that hospital. His employers at the hospital then told him not to run a medical sideline, so he converted to running a Mobile Money shop (still secretly selling some medicines).

Then in early 2019 he paid a bribe to secure a promotion and he found he had to spend more time at work, so he closed the Money shop, and started planning how to buy and enlarge the shop. He succeeded and was soon renting out two small housing units on both floors of what he built.

In 2020 he and his wife became the only two people in all our 60 Diary households to be formally diagnosed as having Covid (though he didn't believe the diagnosis). They were not seriously ill. They were cheered up by the oldest girl getting very good school-end exam results. In 2022 he sold some land (that we were not aware of) for 600,000 taka, and the following year bought family farmland from his uncle and also the plot opposite the hospital. That year, 2023, they unexpectedly had a fourth child, a son. But in 2024 the eldest daughter failed an admission test for a nursing college and he paid out a massive 1.5 million taka to get her into a posh private one. Then the hospital authorities turfed him out of his subsidized housing, objecting to his habit of rearing cows there (another profitable sideline).

Diarist 27, on the left, with Diary Project Manager Kalim in 2018

Diarist 27, chart 01, balance

Gifts

Diarist 27 has given a few loans for conventional purposes, like family weddings and medical needs, and to the local mosque, but has received very few, rather small loans. Gifts do not feature largely in his financial life so we are not providing a chart.

Loans

Loans, by contrast, have been important. They help explain some of the unanswered questions in chart 01. The huge payment to get his daughter into college in mid 2024, for example, was paid for by a 'rehan' loan. He took 1.2 million taka from a lender and in return gave that lender use of part of the newly-built property and land opposite the hospital, including the receipt of rents. Under rehan rules, he can only get the property back when he repays every penny of the 1.2 million. At the same time he borrowed 400,000 taka on interest from a work colleague and a further 300,000 taka from his wife's account at the MFI IDF. Just recently (December 2024) he has borrowed 1 million from Sonali Bank as a first step in assembling enough money to redeem his rehan. Getting a Sonali (Government-owned) Bank loan is a perk of having two government employees in the household - the repayments are deducted from their salaries, in a pattern he has used earlier for loans for construction. He has been willing to 'roll over' his Bank loans (at some cost). He has also ben able to borrow from his employment Gratuity Fund, for example in August 2020 for construction work, and again in August 2025.

The answer to the question posed above as to how they financed the land purchase in 2016 is that they persuaded someone with a Grameen Bank MFI account, who was in very good stead with the MFI, to borrow 200,000 taka from Grameen and pass it on to Diarist 27 as a 'proxy' loan.

Altogether since we started with him, he has borrowed 9.9 million taka in 198 loans from various sources including four MFIs (Grameen Bank, IDF, ASA and Islami), the Co-op, private loans and howlats (interest-free loans). We have recorded 8 million taka of repayments so far in more than 1,500 instalments (the rehan is still outstanding). Fresh loans have been used to repay older loans, and savings have been tapped: but he has succeeded in using loans to his advantage.

Right now the college fees have set him back a bit - and he has lost control of his main property investment. He moved onto the hospital campus but when they got turned out for rearing a cow there they moved to a small part of his property still under his control.

Diarist 27, chart 02. loans

Savings

Diarist 27 and his wife have been consistent savers, he at the Co-operative and she at the various MFIs where she has had accounts (ASA, Grameen Bank, IDF, Pidim, and Islami). At Grameen Bank she held successive long-term accumulating savings accounts (the GPS) as well as the regular weekly compulsory savings. Altogether she made 897 deposits into the various MFI accounts for a total of 316,320: she withdrew 138,000 of this money in just five quite large amounts. Diarist 27 himself made 281 deposits into the Co-op for a total of 296,530 taka of which he has withdrawn 242,450 )these numbers all up to end 2024). These savings have given them a way of reconciling income and expenditure imbalances over the years.

At Sonali Bank he has sometimes stored part or all of his loans in a savings account at the Bank, for shorter or longer periods. He did so at the end of 2019, for example, as shown in chart 03. He did it when he was in his building campaign, withdrawing cash at intervals to pay for materials. In early 2022 he put the proceeds of his sale of land into another bank (SouthEast Bank) and withdrew half of it in May of the same year. The Banks, then, were useful for his bigger transactions.

Diarist 27, chart 03, savings

We add a further chart to show in more detail Diarist 27's saving activity in the twelve months to the end of October 2020. This covers the period after he took a large loan from Sonali Bank, transferred the loan money to savings, and then withdrew in stages to finance his construction work. It shows the contrast between the big-ticket transactions at the Bank and the many-but-small transactions with the MFIs. These were interrupted for the only time during the first Covid lockdown in the spring of 2020 (when he and his wife were diagnosed with the virus).

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