Remittance-rich Sylhet ranks poorest in new index

Long seen as the “London of Bangladesh” for its foreign earnings and opulent villas, Sylhet has been dealt a sobering blow. The country’s first Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) has revealed that the division is, in fact, the poorest in Bangladesh when measured by access to education, healthcare and living standards.

Despite its image of wealth, due to generations of expatriates sending money home, Sylhet has topped the national poverty chart in both overall MPI score and the intensity of deprivation.

According to poverty analysts and researchers, the underdeveloped haor region and the plight of workers in the division’s tea estates have weighed heavily on Sylhet’s standing.

They say that while Sylhet receives the third-highest remittance inflow in the country, the money is rarely invested in education or health. Instead, it fuels lavish lifestyles, leaving millions trapped in poverty.

In the recently published MPI, Sylhet stands as the most deprived division with a score of 0.177, overtaking usually poorer regions like Barishal and Mymensingh.

More than 37.7 percent of the population in the division, around 41.9 lakh people, are classified as multidimensionally poor. Besides, the intensity of poverty in the division is the highest in the country, at 46.86 percent.

In the division, north eastern district of Sunamganj scores 0.225 in the index and ranks as the third poorest district in Bangladesh.

The MPI index was developed by the General Economics Division (GED) using clustered data from pre-Covid 2019. The GED collaborated with the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics, Unicef and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) for the publication.

Nationally, 24.05 percent of people are multidimensionally poor, with an average deprivation intensity of 44.17 percent. Sylhet accounts for 11.66 percent of the country’s multidimensionally poor population, despite making up less than 8 percent of the total population.

The 2012 harmonised dataset tells a story of decline.

Sylhet then ranked as the third poorest division, with a score of 0.237 and half of its people in multidimensional poverty.

At the time, Barishal and Mymensingh were worse off. Between 2012 and 2019, every division improved, and Sylhet’s MPI dropped. But others progressed faster, pushing Sylhet to the bottom.

AK Enamul Haque, director general of the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies (BIDS), said, “As this is the first MPI of the country, there might be anomalies with the data. In general, we consider affordability indicators to determine poverty, but this index is based on access indicators.”

“The vast haor and tea garden areas of the region impacted the score where people have accessibility issues to education or healthcare. But still, this is a learning, and there is room for improvement,” Haque said.

Sunamganj’s entrenched poverty is clear. In 2012, it posted an MPI of 0.289, with 58.9 percent of people identified as multidimensionally poor. By 2019, the score dipped only slightly to 0.225, with 47.4 percent still considered poor, and the intensity of deprivation barely changing at 47.5 percent.

The district fares poorly in nearly every area: education, nutrition, access to clean water, reproductive health and household assets, according to the MPI.

Munira Begum, joint chief of the Poverty Analysis and Monitoring Wing of the GED, said, “The poverty index is not based on income, but based on the indicators of accessibility. The vast haor areas of the region contributed to the downfall of the region, while other regions leveraged public investments and infrastructural development by 2012 and 2019.”

Recent data by the Bangladesh Bank shows that Sylhet remains the third largest remittance recipient, after Dhaka and Chattogram.

Rezai Karim Khondker, former professor of economics at Shahjalal University of Science and Technology, said, “Historically, Sylhet was a prosperous region. But in the last couple of decades, the prosperity has been declining. This is not surprising to see Sylhet is marked as the poorest division in the country.”

“Sylhet was an educationally enriched region once, but the trend of immigrating to other countries is gripping the prosperity. Remittance inflow increased, but it was never invested in the development or the benefit of the region,” said the professor.

Advocate Sha Saheda Akther, general secretary of civil society platform Shushasoner Jonno Nagorik (SUJAN) in Sylhet, said, “Sylhet has historically seen large in-migration. Many residents here have livelihoods that differ from the local population.”

“By focusing only on service access and not considering local economic realities, the index may have conveyed a misleading picture. There is a need for broader research and inclusion of economic indicators in future versions,” added Akther.