It was evening. I was walking to workplace on Kazi Nazrul Islam Avenue. As I crossed the road at Banglamotor intersection, a young man sitting on a motorcycle called out, 'Brother, will you go?'
Unprepared and slightly annoyed, I replied, 'Did I ask you?'
The young man remained unresponsive, looking away with a sullen face. I stopped a little forward thinking that I think I gave him a lot of trouble. I thought, I should have said it like this. Returning to regret, I asked, 'Sorry', 'maybe you are not getting passengers for a long time?'
With great difficulty, the bike driver said that he had been standing for about one and a half hours, and could not find anyone to take him. After a long wait, if someone wants to go, there is a competition among the bikers standing with him. The passenger also takes that opportunity. Someone agrees to go for a lower fare, so the bikers ask the pedestrian if they see someone walking. The driver said that he could not get a job after passing his Master's degree from the National University, so he was forced to ride a bike. He said, 'It is not that there is no shame in calling someone like this, but nothing is greater than hunger and survival.'
I see bikers standing for a long time with dirty faces like this every day while coming to workplace. In other words, they are seen sitting unemployed like this all over the city of Dhaka. Recent data from various research institutes including Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET) says that there are more than 10 lakh motorbikes in the capital city of Dhaka. It can be assumed that a large part of them are connected to various ride sharing apps and hit the road to transport passengers on hire. Even after connecting to the ride sharing app, most of the bikers now agree to go to the desired destination by negotiating with interested passengers on the way.
According to 2022 statistics, there are currently over 32 lakh registered motorcycles in the country. Even at different district and upazila levels of the country, the practice of passenger transportation on motorbikes has started long ago. While visiting the Sundarbans in 2010, I saw two or three people riding on a bike in Mongla. After reviewing, it has been found that a large part of the educated youth of the country, not getting the desired job or waiting to apply for a job, have started to transport passengers on this motorcycle for the need of livelihood. But when one of the people of this nation is seen doing something or gets news of any possibility, everyone gets excited about it. In this traditional custom, many more bikers than necessary have come to transport passengers. So even if you go down the road hoping for a living, you are not seeing any passengers, you are also failing to earn the desired income. A large part of the young manpower thus sinks into despair and often meets with road accidents. Sometimes they get involved in various social crimes.
Many policymakers do not want to take into account the impact on public life of the extreme rise in commodity prices. Many of them can be heard saying in the face of journalists, 'There is no shortage of goods in the market' or 'People's purchasing power has now increased' etc. But how difficult it is for that class to survive in the society who have acquired a kind of self-esteem by getting education, who are unable to express their helplessness even in extreme poverty, can be easily understood by looking at the face of the bike driver standing for the passenger for a long time. Nowadays, it is not difficult to imagine the anger and heat within the society due to the welfare of social media. We notice that the rising rich are living a classless and glittering life, and on the other hand, in extreme despair, the sadness of not being able to gather enough food for hunger at the end of the day or the manager's anger at not being able to pay a small amount of money for the mess at the end of the month.
We see many more young people in different professions who are not able to make a living by transporting passengers on bikes, whose situation is even worse. A few days ago, I saw the news in mainstream newspapers about the incident that went viral on social media - after buying big fish in Kaowran Bazaar, the fish intestines, fins and other discarded parts are also being sold for free. A class of people is buying it while covering their faces. According to published news, they are neither beggars nor scoundrels. Those who are buying the share of those discarded fish parts are educated unemployed people who are in dire straits. They cannot afford to buy fish at Tk. 700-Tk. 800 per kg.
At present, the so-called 'development-progress' cannot be simplified by seeing the country's unstructured structure and the huge prestige of some people. We can unequivocally say that this development has not eliminated overall socio-economic inequality. Just as this bright city is nothing but a disappointment to the educated young man standing for an hour and a half at Banglamotor junction, similarly to the farmer in a remote village who does not get a fair price for his crops, the gray life is all bleak.