Diarist 34

Diarist 34 in the year to July 2025:
Status: wife, mother, household manager Household size: 4 (she, husband, 2 sons + 1 son overseas)
Occupation: receives remittances. Education: grade 5 (also husband grade 5)
Major assets: home on homestead land and 3.5 acres of farmland, shop premises rented out, good quality home furnishings
Net income year to Jul 2025: 329,010 taka (USD 2,742 PPP$ 10,240, or PPP$ 7.01 per day per person): Income in kind: about 40,000 in the year from consumption of produce farmed on their land
End Sep 2024 balances at formal FSPs: Savings 1,000,500 taka, Loans 0
main worry about her family, May 2025: my son who got into trouble overseas and was sent back

Diarist 34 is among the better-off Diarists. She and her husband own 3.5 acres of farmland on which they grow mostly vegetables and they are the landlords of a shop that is rented out. They have a well-built home with good furniture. The couple both reached grade 5 in school. Much of this wealth is because her husband had been established in Singapore as an office-cleaner since 4 years before we started tracking them, steadily remitting. He rarely came home. He lost his job there in 2019 but by then their oldest of 3 sons had reached Saudi Arabia. Almost immediately that son had an industrial accident, lost two fingers, and was hospitalized at his company's expense, but after a year his remittances started to flow. When Covid hit, the son's income fell, but recovered. By 2023 they were trying to get the second son a job in Greece.

In 2019 Diarist 34 started planning home renovation and most of the big expenditures from then on are for construction work. In 2023 she inherited land jointly with Diarist 29 (her sister-in-law), sold some of the land, and with her sister-in-law (her husband's brother's wife) and others donated money to found a madrassa.

Chart 01 shows how abundant remittances and farm sales gave them many surplus months.

Diarist 34's dovecote

Diarist 34, chart 01, balance

Chart 02 shows the value and composition of Diarist 34's gross income, by year for the complete years.

The dependence on remittances, first from the husband and then from the son, is clear.

In 2020 and 2021 (a period disrupted by Covid and its lockdowns) they boosted revenue from their land, but note that this is gross farm income and not adjusted for the cost of inputs.

Rent income from their shop has risen steadily along with inflation.

Not shown in the chart is the large 656,000 taka proceeds from the sale of inherited land, in 2020.

Note that most of the remittances from the husband were sent from Singapore by the informal hundi system, while those from the son in Saudi Arabia have come electronically and travelled the final miles via the bKash mobile money service.

Diarist 34, chart 02, value and composition of income

Gifts

In August 2021 we recorded Diarist 34 getting a 20,000 taka gift from her brother, but apart from a small gift from a Gojo visitor, that was the only gift.

On the other hand, as befits a better-off household, she gave numerous gifts (we counted 82), the biggest being for the madrassa foundation and many of the others being to religious institutions and staff, with some family gifts.

Diarist 34, chart 03, gifts

Loans

Diarist 34 has had an account at the MFI Grameen Bank since before we knew her. However, she was more interested in saving than borrowing. She took a succession of 7 small loans of 10,000 taka, never more, largely because she understood that Grameen needed her to borrow. As Grameen loan officers got more insistent on her taking loans, she became progressively more stubborn about it and her 8th and last loan from the MFI was for only 6,000. Finally in June 2021 she closed the account. She had repaid all the loans at the weekly meetings, along with depositing her savings.

She took one big howlat, of 240,000 taka, from her sister for the construction work (only partially repaid so far) and two smaller howlats of 10,000 each (both repaid) for the same purpose.

She also gave howlats to family and neighbours.

Diarist 34, chart 04, loans

Savings

Diarist 34 used to receive remittances from her Singapore-based husband through the hundi system, and store the cash at home. But by the middle of 2016 she had opened an account at a formal bank (BKB, the farmers' bank) to store them as they arrived. This bank then proved to be her main vehicle for storing money: for example, she withdrew from it in a hurry to get her son overseas after her husband lost his Singapore job. But she was aware that deposits into the Post Office held by individuals attract, through government subsidy, very high interest earnings, and in late 2019 she transferred a lot of money from the BKB into the Post Office (it is still there). She took much of the remaining money out of BKB for the construction work.

Meanwhile she did not ignore the MFIs. She made 379 deposits into MFI Grameen Bank and BURO up to the end of 2024, totaling 78,000 taka. These included her use of the GPS account at Grameen, into which she made fixed monthly deposits for a fixed term and earned better interest. She exited both MFIs in mid 2021.

Diarist 34, chart 05, savings

The Hundi system

Widely used by remitters to low-income countries, but the target of attempts to eliminate it by governments, the Hundi system relies on there being pairs of traders in different countries dealing with each other. So when Diarist 34's husband wanted to send money to Bangladesh from Singapore he went to such a trader in Singapore and gave him local currency. That trader then phoned a known trader in Bangladesh, telling him he had received a certain amount of money which he would subtract from the trading debt owed him by the Bangladeshi trader. The Bangladeshi trader then sent taka to the end recipient. Meanwhile Diarist 34 and her husband were on the phone monitoring the process. It worked well, if a little expensive.

On to Diarist 35

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