Diarist 45

Diarist 45 in the year to June 2026:
Status: husband, father, household manager Household size: 4 (he, wife, 2 children)
Occupation: farm labour, small scale farmer. Education: none (wife grade 5)
Major assets: home on homestead land, livestock
Net income in the year to June 2026: 111,915 taka (USD 925 PPP$ 3,497, or PPP$ 2.40 per day per person): Income in kind: up to 80,000 in the year from consumption of own farming produce
End Sep 2025 balances at formal FSPs: Savings 0 taka, Loans 0
main worry about his family, May 2025: my future - I have no reliable employment and am trying to go overseas

We met Diarist 45 when he was a 23-year-old illiterate migrant labourer from a poorer District, with a serious and hardworking attitude to life. He was working in the fields, on irrigation schemes, and on construction sites, and had share-cropped in a small piece of land to do his own farming. He had married a woman from his own village and they had just had their first child, a daughter. His wife reached class 5 in school. They were living in a very small rented room paying 900 taka a month. He has four brothers and a sister as well as his parents back in the village and he was sending them between 800 and 1,000 taka month, through the Mobile Money company bKash.

He was planning to go abroad and had been storing up money for this with a moneyguard. In 2016 he paid a migration agent 50,000 taka. But the plan came to nothing. Then in 2018 a local farmer who appreciated his hard work took the family into his own house and started giving Diarist 45 a small monthly wage, while his wife worked as their cook.

In mid 2019 he heard from a friend that there were good wages to be earned by labouring in Chittagong (south-east Bangladesh) in the ship-breaking business. They moved there, hoping that he would get trained as a welder. But there was no good training and the work was dangerous and, besides, his father had fallen sick. In March 2020 he went home and the following day his father died. He stayed on and tried to get work as an apprentice welder but the Covid lockdown closed the workshop where he worked. He went to Chittagong for the harvest, then back to the Gazipur area as a building labourer.

They then moved back to his village home where he settled down as a small-time landless farmer again sharecropping-in land. In 2022 their second child, a son, was born, by caesarean and therefore expensively. We collect his records by phone. He is growing rice, groundnuts and chilies and is rearing a cow and a goat. Everyone is generally healthy but in April 2026 his wife fell and injured her back.

Chart 01 shows how Diarist 45 has been able to keep his head above water, on a monthly basis, most months. He and his brother registered the homestead land (about 0.05 of an acre) that became theirs when their father died. They still have no farm land of their own.

Diarist 45, chart 01, balance

Gifts...

...played almost no part in Diarist 45's life so we are not providing a chart. He got two gifts, total value less than 1,000 taka, and gave eight gifts, none worth more than 1,000: they were for his father, his nephew, and the mosque.

Loans

Diarist 45's loans have been only in the informal market, and have been quite sparse. In 2016 they played a part in a complex transaction that he made with his father. At that time he and his father had two ambitions: to get Diarist 45 to a job in Iraq, and to buy a small plot of land that had become available adjacent to their village home. As part of this he took a howlat of 50,000 from a longstanding friend, which he has yet to repay. We give more details about these transactions in the next section, on savings.

There was a further smaller howlat for childbirth costs. He also took a 'paddy loan' - in which the borrower borrows against his forthcoming harvest: these are usually repaid in kind (the paddy crop) but he chose to repay in cash. Earlier, a farmer's wife took a loan from the MFI Grameen Bank of 10,000 and passed half of it to Diarist 45, and he repaid her on a more-or-les weekly basis at 125 taka a week. He also took small occasional howlats from the farmer who sheltered them in the early days.

Diarist 45, chart 02, loans

Savings

The only record we have of Diarist 45 saving was when in October 2016 he deposited a massive 150,000 taka with his father. Where did this money come from? 50,000 taka came from a new howlat from a friend (shown in chart 02). A further 60,000 taka came from a repayment of a howlat he himself had made several years before to another friend (shown in chart 03). That suggests that he had for a long time been a good saver, and indeed when we first met him he told us he had about 40,000 taka locked in a trunk in his rented house, and that he had also been using his father, as well as a friend, as a moneyguard.

And so in a series of transactions in 2016 he was able to send 150,000 taka to his father, who promptly used some to buy the small piece of land and add it to their homestead. His father also returned 50,000 taka to Diarist 45 to allow him to pay a migration agent. That money was lost - the migration to Iraq failed and the agent never returned any money. All that Diarist 45 got out of the deal with the agent was a passport.

After that we have records of no further saving transactions but we know that Diarist 45 still tries to save at home.

Diarist 45, chart 03, savings

On to Diarist 46

Back to Diarist 43

Back to Data page