Diarist 30

Diarist 30 in the year to July 2025:
Status: husband, father, household manager Household size: 6 (he. wife, 4 children)
Occupation: newspaper vendor. Education: grade 4 (wife grade 5)
Major assets: home on homestead land and 1 acre of farmland, cow, new motorbike
Net income year to Jul 2025: 65,662 taka (USD 547 PPP$ 2,044, or PPP$ 1.40 per day per person): Income in kind: about 57,000 in the year from consumption of own farming produce
End Sep 2024 balances at formal FSPs: Savings 1,171 taka, Loans 0
main worry about his family, May 2025: the need to formalise my daughter's unofficial marriage

Diarist 30 is a newspaper vendor, and he's very methodical and steady at his trade. Every morning he goes by motorbike to buy a stack of newspapers (all Bengali-language) from the wholesaler, then hawks them for cash around the streets, and visits clients who take a paper regularly on credit. As chart 01 shows, his income and his business costs have been very steady throughout, except for a gap at the time of the Covid shutdown in 2020. Before Covid, he had been buying the same number of papers, at the same price (930 taka), since before we started tracking him in 2015. He barely missed a day, seven days a week. After Covid he at first dropped the number of papers he bought each day, but eventually returned to similar levels as in his pre-Covid days. His income fluctuates a little more than his outgoings, simply because credit-customers pay him at varied times - though he has been very good at getting them to pay. At any time he has about 150,000 taka out in baki (credit to his customers). He sells all or almost all the papers he buys: any left over cannot be returned to the wholesaler and he is obliged to sell them as scrap.

He and his wife have a village home and about an acre of farmland, from which they occasionally sell bamboo or timber and more often the goats and cows that they raise. They have a son and three daughters, and the education and futures of their children are their main preoccupation. Diarist 30 reached grade 4 and his wife grade 5, and the children are doing well in school. In 2024 they were in discussions over a marriage proposal for the first daughter: initially it fell through but in 2025 she was successfully married and Diarist 30 spent a lot of money on the wedding fast. He also bought himself a new motorbike around that time..

Diarist 30

Diarist 30, chart 01, balance

Gifts

Diarist 30 has given many small gifts of a conventional nature - that is, for religious and family support. But we have recorded him getting gifts from others on only two occasions - the circumcision ceremony of his son in 2016 ans the wedding feast for his daughter in 2025.

Gifts are not part of how they regularly maintain their lives.

Diarist 30, chart 02, gifts

Loans

Diarist 30 told us when we first met him that he doesn't take loans and doesn't believe he could manage the strict repayment rules for MFI loans (though in our opinion he probably could). He has been as good as his word: we haven't recorded him taking any MFI or Bank loans.

Nor has he made a habit of borrowing in the informal market. But in 2025 to finance the big wedding feast for his daughter he took several howlats from neighbours.

This lack of borrowing may in part reflect the rather quiet nature of his life - we haven't seen him go through any financial crises.

Diarist 30, chart 03, loans

Savings

Until early 2017 we didn't record Diarist 30 making any kind of financial transaction at all, but then in February of that year he opened an account at the Co-operative. Since then, up to the end of 2024, he has made 2,227 individual deposits into his Co-op account, using the daily-collection service. That's close to a deposit every day. Most deposits are of just 20 or sometimes 40 taka. The total amount saved was 116,000 taka.

He has withdrawn his savings just 5 times, totaling 109,240 taka. The biggest was 31,500 in 2022 for building the new bathroom. Two others went for the Muslim Eid ceremony. Once, in December 2018, he moved some of his savings from the Co-op's 'starter' account* into another account that pays better interest. Then he withdrew cash in 2025 for his daughter's wedding feast.

*This is the 'P9' account which helps poor people get going with savings by giving them interest-free loans out of which they must save a proportion. They repay the loan and then take another, bigger one, out of which they must, again, save a proportion.

Diarist 30, chart 04, savings

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