Two elderly women stood for nearly two hours on Wednesday behind an Open Market Sale (OMS) truck of the Directorate of Food beside Dhaka Residential Model College in Mohammadpur, waiting to buy subsidised rice and flour. Both are called Fatema Begum, one in her 80s and the other 74. They are friends and neighbours in the same lane of the Bihari camp in Mohammadpur.
Buyers at the spot said the truck arrived around 10 am and a queue of more than a hundred people formed within minutes. When a Prothom Alo reporter arrived around noon, the older Fatema Begum had bought her rice and flour and was waiting by the road for her daughter-in-law. Tired of the wait, she had also shopped at the makeshift market beside the queue: two bunches of spinach, two cauliflowers and half a kilogram each of radish and cucumber.
She could not say her exact age and guessed she might be 80. She cannot work outside and relies on money from her daughter and daughter-in-law. She left home at 9 am, found a long queue, and was called forward after a long wait. Shahriar Nafiz, the salesman on the truck, said they had been told to serve the very elderly, people with disabilities and pregnant women ahead of others, which is why she was called separately.
Her friend, the second Fatema Begum, said she also buys rice and flour from the OMS trucks once or twice a week, mainly for the rice.
Dhaka Rationing, under the Directorate of Food, sold rice and flour from OMS trucks at 118 places in the capital on Wednesday. Each buyer may take up to 5 kilograms of rice at Tk 30 a kilogram and two 2-kilogram packets of flour, 4 kilograms in all, at Tk 55 a packet. Rice of the same quality sells at Tk 55 a kilogram in the market and loose flour at Tk 50, so buying from the truck saves about Tk 215.
The trouble is the amount of rice. Each truck carries 1.5 tonnes of rice and 2 tonnes of flour, enough for 300 people to buy rice and 400 to buy flour, although rice is in greater demand. Watching the truck until 3 pm, the reporter saw many buyers go home without rice and some leave with flour only. The report is by Prothom Alo's staff correspondent.
Photo: Press Information Department / Wikimedia Commons (Public domain)
Source: Prothom Alo
Comments
(0)