Diarist 36

Diarist 36 in the year to March 2026:
Status: husband, father, household manager Household size: 3 (he, wife, a son; another son overseas)
Occupation: farmer, cattle raiser, businessman, remittances. Education: grade 8 (wife grade 3)
Major assets: home on homestead land and 0.2 acres of farmland, cows, rickshaw rented out
Net income in the year to March 2026: 315,520 taka (USD 2,608 PPP$ 9,860, or PPP$ 9.00 per day per person): Income in kind: about 40,000 in the year from consumption of own farming produce
End Sep 2025 balances at formal FSPs: Savings 47,772 taka, Loans 0
main worry about his family, May 2025: a land dispute with relatives that is getting hot

Diarist 36 is one of our most colourful. He has the ingenuity of Diarist 10 but is more organised and ambitious. He is at heart a devoted cattle raiser but will try his hand at anything else that comes his way. He is very sociable, and attended secondary school, and this has allowed him to become friends with some influential people despite his humble origins in the Hrishipara settlement where he still lives, with his wife and younger son, in a small old house on the edge of the river, overlooking the meadows where he grazes his cows. Over the years he used his farm earnings to invest in other people's shops, and to do a little informal pawnbroking. His father-in-law, on his deathbed, requested Diarist 36 to 'look after' his son, and Diarist 36 found a way to get this brother-in-law to Singapore where he has prospered. He is happy to buy up assets and put them to good use: an old rickshaw, even a disused rice mill. He has also bought and sold land. During the Covid lockdown, when transport was curtailed, he bought up, at very low cost, perishable food from local farmers that would normally be shipped to Dhaka, and sold it on the roadside outside the Hrishipara settlement.

In early 2020 he started on a new plan, to get his son to Canada. He put the son through a severe educational regime, and though things were held up by Covid, the son reached Canada on a student visa in 2022 and has since gained residence rights there and found a job. The son now remits, and Diarist 36 and his wife are planning a holiday trip to Canada to visit him. The son's first child was born in mid 2025. The son has told his father to borrow heavily from an MFI and put the proceeds into savings in the same MFI: our Diarist doesn't know why he was told to do this, but in January 2026 he did it, borrowing 185,000 from MFI Shakti..

Diarist 36, though by no means addicted, likes to drink alcohol and smoke ganja (marijuana) occasionally, and this has got him into trouble. He has paid bribes to the police to keep them at bay while smoking with friends.

Diarist 36 (in blue) watches as his cow is de-leeched.
Diary Project Manager Kalim looks on.

As chart 01 shows, there have been several large transactions. Especially in the later years, these have helped maintain Diarist 36's monthly balances.

Diarist 36, chart 01, balance

Gifts

This Diarist has received so few gifts that we would not normally show a 'gifts' chart. However, the one big gift is significant, because it demonstrates Diarist 36's relationship with the local elite and his determination to do things in a carefully calculated way. Rather than tread the path of so many local people, and get a son to Singapore or Saudi Arabia as a labourer, Diarist 36 researched the idea of getting his son to a developed western country as a student. He then persuaded both the head of the local authority (the TNO) and the District Commissioner of Gazipur, with whom he had developed links, to head a list of sponsors for the boy.

Aside from that Diarist 36 gave a large number of small gifts to family members and neighbours and the local temple.

Diarist 36, chart 02, gifts

Loans

Diarist 36, who prefers to be self-sufficient, is not keen on borrowing, but has proved willing to use loans strategically. For the first 4 years of our project he relied on being paid back for various howlats he had given over the years. This helped to cover day-to-day shortages. Then when he started planning his son's Canada adventure he borrowed heavily, on howlat (interest-free) terms from a nephew (the prosperous shop-keeping son of the brother-in-law he had helped get to Singapore).

Later, once the boy was in Canada, Diarist 36's wife joined an MFI, Shakti, and borrowed money in order to repay the nephew's howlat. This was followed by another, bigger Shakti loan a year later which has gone towards the upfront costs of their planned holiday with their son in Canada. She has been repaying weekly.

Diarist 36, chart 03, loans

Savings

Chart 04 completes the picture of how he managed money for the bigger events in his life. From before we started tracking him he had an account at the Co-op (very close to his home) and used it to store income from his various activities. In May 2016 the Co-op was briefly in dispute with its regulator and returned his savings to him (196,000 by then). The dispute was soon resolved and Diarist 36 went back to using the Co-op as his main formal money store. He had 145,000 there in late 2024.

He took money out of the Co-op at the beginning of 2020 and along with the big howlat from his nephew (see chart 03) opened an account on the advice of his migration consultant at a formal bank, the Premier. He took that money back in the beginning of 2022 for the final main costs of getting his son to Canada. He then went back to storing his money in the Co-op. His son persuaded him to buy a motorbike, for which he withdrew Co-op savings in 2025.

Diarist 36, chart 04, savings

Diarist 36 during the Covid lockdown

Diarist 36 featured as a case study in a UN publication on the Impact of Covid which you can read on our publications or by clicking this link: The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the poor: Insights from the Hrishipara diaries - ScienceDirect.

We also featured Diarist 36 in another of our own publications (second corona blog.pdf) , where we disguise him as 'Samarth'. and describe how he set up a roadway shop to sell vegetables that farmers had been unable to ship to Dhaka. Here are two figures from that publication.

Diarist 36, figure 01, Diarist 36, centre, selling the vegetables

Diarist 36, figure 02, Diarist 36's finances just before and at the start of the first Covid lockdown

On to Diarist 38

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