In Feni, many people queue for two or three hours to buy subsidised rice and flour under the open market sale (OMS) programme and still go home with nothing. Each buyer may take five kilograms of rice at Tk 30 a kg and five kilograms of flour at Tk 24. Long lines of low-income people form outside the outlets from dawn, but the allocation is too small for all of them.
According to Amar Desh, OMS sales began in Feni municipality in 2010 with six outlets for 18 wards. Sixteen years on there are still six, so sales cannot run more than two or three days a week. Neighbouring Cumilla has raised its count to 32 outlets, Food Department figures show, while Noakhali has 17, Chandpur 15 and Brahmanbaria 12.
Md Akbar Hossain, the OMS dealer for ward 8, said he receives stock two days some weeks and three days in others, 750 kg of rice and 750 kg of flour each time, and sells from 9:30 in the morning until midday. One tonne each of rice and flour at least five days a week would meet some of the demand, he said.
The district food controller's office says Feni municipality's population was 192,000 in 2010 and is now 278,000, up by about 42 percent. Thousands of workers at the 17 Star Line Group factories, Abul Khair Match Factory, Quality Jute Mill and other plants also come to the outlets for cheap food.
District food controller Md Alauddin Dhali said that with six outlets, sales run in wards 1 to 6 one day and wards 7 to 12 the next. Other districts have a daily allocation of three tonnes of rice and flour sold from trucks, but Feni has none. Senior officials have been told that more outlets, larger allocations and truck sales are needed, he said.
Deputy commissioner Mohammad Mahbubul Karim, who chairs the district OMS committee, said Feni has many working and low-income people, and others come from other districts looking for work, yet the number of outlets has not grown in all these years, which he called regrettable.
The OMS programme started in September 2007 at Palashi Bazar in Dhaka, after the global food crisis and a sharp rise in rice prices at home, and was later extended across the country to protect poor people's food security.
Photo: Press Information Department / Wikimedia Commons (public domain); an OMS rice and flour sale in the Dhaka region in 2024 (illustrative).
Source: Amar Desh
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