People suffer much with price hike of essentials

Staff Reporter :
People have been suffering much with the unusual price hike of the essential commodities as they are failing to bridge between income and expenditure.
Normal life is disrupted due to the inconsistency between income and expenditure. The prices of daily necessities including gas, cooking oil, rice, pulses, fish, meat, vegetables have increased in last few months, which has fallen the people in the hardship and many have fallen into debt to bear their family expenditure.
Even in the higher living cost, many are losing jobs and source of income for the disrupted economic activities caused by the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine.
As a result, consumption declined at the household level, particularly in low-income families, experts said.
They said that 23 per cent people are very rich, wealthy and upper-middle-class but the remaining 77 per cent are affected by the increasing cost of living severely.
According to the latest data of the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistic (BBS), the wages have increased by 7.6 per cent in January, the first month of the calendar year, but the people are not getting relief from growing inflation.
The BBS takes into account the daily earnings of low-wage skilled and unskilled workers based on hours of work or attendance in determining the wage index. Monthly or contractual income was not included in the wage index.
Some 44 occupations in agriculture, industry and service sectors are taken into account in determining wage rates.
There is no problem for upper class for higher inflation and the upper-middle class can also adapt. But the lower-middle class and low-income people are under pressure.
The BBS data also showed that the inflation rate was 8.57 per cent in last month, although, the different research firms said that the actual inflation rate was higher than the government statistic.
As a result, gap between income and expenditure is widening constantly, the experts said.
Dr Saima Haque Bidisha, Research Director of the South Asian Network on Economic Modeling (SANEM), told The New Nation, “The wage growth rate has been low compared to inflation for the past few months. In this situation, the real purchasing power of people is decreasing.”
“Low income group are affected severely as a large part of their income is spent on food products. The social security program of the government is not enough for them,” she said.
Humayun Kabir Bhuiyan, Secretary of the Consumers Association of Bangladesh (CAB), said that higher inflation is unlikely to end any sooner, rather the uptrend may continue for some times more and the prices may gradually rise in the day ahead.
He also noted that millions of people have become poor from lower-income group amid a gradual hike in commodity prices as well as squeeze in their income in the last few months.
Value chain expert Dr Md Anisur Rahman said that apart from some reasons like Russia-Ukraine war, local currency depreciation or fuel price hike, oligarch of a section of giant companies have largely caused a surge in essentials’ prices in Bangladesh.