The government has decided to run a special open market sale (OMS) to sell rice cheaply to garment workers squeezed by high inflation. Each worker will be able to buy up to 10 kg a month at Tk 30 a kilo. Food ministry sources said the programme will run for three months at first.
The ministry plans to start in Dhaka city, the rest of Dhaka district, Gazipur and Narayanganj districts, and Chattogram city and district. Nasima Akter, joint secretary at the food ministry, told Prothom Alo on Wednesday that it would begin this month, most likely on Friday, 20 November.
The rice will be sold from 75 open trucks on Fridays, the garment industry's weekly day off. At five tonnes a truck, a total of 375 tonnes will be sold to workers at the reduced price.
On Wednesday the food ministry wrote to the finance ministry asking for an extra allocation in the 2026-27 budget; the letter was signed by senior assistant secretary Md Al Mamun. It says government warehouses hold enough rice, so the programme can be supplied from existing stocks, and asks for an additional 4,500 tonnes of rice under OMS plus funds for running the trucks, transport and other costs.
The decision comes amid unrest in the industrial belts over pay, as the minimum wage board has begun work with two meetings so far. At Monday's meeting the workers' representative proposed a minimum wage of Tk 32,000. According to Mapped in Bangladesh, the country has 3,320 garment factories employing 2,987,000 workers, 57 percent of them women.
Babul Akhter, the workers' representative on the wage board, said the scheme would not treat workers with dignity. After six days of back-breaking work, he told Prothom Alo, they would have to queue for hours on their day off for rice, and saving Tk 300 is no real solution. Cheap goods should be sold at the factory gate, he said, and not just rice but lentils, oil, salt and sugar too.
Source: Prothom Alo
Comments
(0)