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 tells us everyone is healthy, that he is growing rice, groundnuts and chilies and is rearing a cow and a goat.
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.
