Because they could not step away from death, death stepped in for them (apologies to Emily Dickinson). The crack appeared on a boundary wall of Mirpur University College in Dhaka—death sent an early sign. But the people standing in a queue for subsidised essentials had the urgency to live; without food, their families would starve to death. Moving away from the cracked wall meant they would lose their spots in the line. The wall, however, had its own schedule. It collapsed, injuring many, and three eventually succumbed to their injuries.
It is easy to blame the substandard construction of the wall. But the real culprit is poverty, which reduced the victims’ freedom to move away from danger even when the signs were there. Poverty reduced both their purchasing power and safety choices.
One of the victims, Nasima Begum (45), used to work as a cleaner for a private company. She went to collect essentials from a food directorate truck during lunch break, skipping her meal. She had taken out some loan to send her husband to Kuwait and was taking care of her own mother as well. Her mother’s reaction—“Who will feed me now?”—is an existential question that has several echoes. The woman who cared for both her husband and her mother is now gone. And we need to lay our ears to hear the pain and anguish.
Rickshaw-puller Md Firoz and local resident Beauty Begum are the two other identified victims of this collapse. We normally canonise the death of great ones and have little to say about the vulnerable members of society. Little do we care if they were the breadwinners of their families. The privileged class has its own wall to keep them away. Yet, they enter our domain when services are needed. Come to think of it, the wall collapsed twice. The first fall is perhaps due to its poor construction or bad maintenance. But these deaths exposed another fallen wall standing between social assistance and public humiliation.
The trucks responsible for open market sales (OMS) normally choose exposed public spaces. They don’t care if the food is distributed in unhygienic conditions, often near open drains and heavy traffic. In Mirpur, the truck was parked by a visible unstable structure. This is possible because the authorities don’t seem to think these citizens are worthy of better services. Even though many middle-class people are reportedly lining up to buy goods from the OMS trucks because their earnings no longer align with their expenditures. The welfare delivery by design makes this temporary roadside transaction a less dignified public affair. Perhaps the state simply assumes that a person with compromised purchasing ability does not deserve to be treated with dignity and safety.
There were about 50-60 people in the crowd. The lucky ones probably could move away in time. Others fell prey to the accident. I am trying to understand why these people did not move away, or, more importantly, why the truck did not move to a safer place. Maybe some of them had spent time and money to get to the distribution point. Some like Nasima might have taken a break from their jobs to buy essentials at a concessional rate. There have been reports of not receiving items even after a long wait. Buying these products from local groceries at market prices was not an option either. For them, the only rational thing to do was to wait despite the intolerable constraints. The danger was half certain, but hunger was obvious.
The length of the queue tells a different story. It could be used to measure the distance between wages and food prices. And the composition of the queue reveals another dimension: cleaners, rickshaw pullers, domestic workers, retired employees, and lower-middle-income families now appear in the same lines. Economic vulnerability is spreading beyond the conventional poor. Economists can come up with polished inflation figures to make us look good on paper. For ordinary people in the queue or nearby, inflation is a lived reality, measured by the number of hours they must stand beside a truck.
While the OMS programme performs an essential function by protecting households against food-price shocks, we need to think of ways to make its delivery mechanism humane. A welfare system should not require a person to demonstrate need through endurance. Standing in a visible queue can expose recipients—especially women, the elderly, and people with disabilities—to heat, rain, harassment, crowding, and social embarrassment. The state gives a price subsidy but extracts labour and time from the beneficiary.
It’s time we identified the weaknesses in OMS distribution and governance. First, the owner of the wall must be held responsible for allowing a dangerous structure to exist beside a public road. Then, the food authority must own up to its own mistakes in choosing an unsafe site. Was there any coordination with the local administration and police in designing crowd management? Can we not have a more humane and dignified distribution system? Instead of an open road, can we designate some shaded ward-level distribution points with scheduled collection windows? Volunteers and tokens can be used for crowd management. The vendor can publicise real-time stock and operating times. There should be assisted services for the elderly and disabled beneficiaries. Government schools after their business hours can be a good choice. Digital systems can be used to monitor the supply chain and distribution process as well as grievances.
Nasima, Firoz and Beauty are names that will soon be lost in a list of other urban casualties. But their deaths reveal the value we have assigned to certain citizens. They are parts of the capital’s invisible engine. Their occupations matter because each performed work that sustains the city while remaining economically vulnerable within it. Nasima skipped lunch to get food for her family. Firoz perhaps wanted to store the groceries inside his rickshaw seat to provide for his family. And the labour of love of a household worker, Beauty, proved costly. Three of them sought a modest public subsidy. In return, the system treated their time, comfort and safety as expendable. They did not die simply because a wall was weak but because the wall remained indifferent to poor citizens. The final indignity would be to describe the event as an unfortunate accident, form a probe body, and pay some token compensation. The state must act humanely so that a citizen does not have to choose between stepping away from danger and taking food home.
Dr Shamsad Mortuza is vice-chancellor at the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh (ULAB).
Views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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