Putting a panama hat knitted with palm leaf over his head to prevent scorching heat and wearing a T-shirt and lungi, 37-year-old Sardar Aslam was busy baking boiled paddy in the sun before husking in a rice mill.
Stout and energetic as he is, Aslam, a father of three, works at a rice mill in Bera upazila under Pabna District since he was 22.
“My children are going to school,” he was talking the Dhaka Tribune recently, as sweat was tickling down his head. “I failed to go to school because of my father’s poor income. Now I have made it for my children.”
His monthly income on the basis of work is now around Tk14,000, which was around Tk7,000 in 2004. The figure shows his wage increased by 100% during the period.
It is also smooth sailing for a mason named 38-year-old Quddus Shayi who earns Tk17,000 per month now. It was Tk9,000 ten years back.
“People now prefer to build brick-built house to traditional tin-shed ones,” said Shayi, who lives in Natunpara under the same district.
Work orders have increased significantly nowadays compared to 10-15 years ago when time was not good, he said, adding that they worked for two weeks of a month due to non-availability of work then.
“It is a place to live in with optimism and ambition. Everywhere you see people aspiring to make more money and to live a better life.”
It is a view that Quddus shares.
This confidence has come with the country’s economic development over the past decade, and even though growth has remained flat, hovering around 6% over the past couple of decades, people like Aslam and Quddus believe that Bangladesh still has miles to go.
In Bangladesh, average rural wages rose to $2.21 a day in 2010 from $1.52 in 2005, a 45% increase, while India saw a rise of 35% between 2005 and 2012 to $2.91 a day from $2.15, according to the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) that reported Rural Wages in Asia released early last month.
The ODI is Britain’s leading independent think tank on international development and humanitarian issues.
Female rural workers in China, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh earn up to a third less than their male counterparts, but the wage gap appears to be narrowing, the report said.
“The rise in rural wages now taking place across Asia could lift hundreds of millions of people out of extreme poverty in the next decade.”
Falling birth rates and a growing demand for factory workers mean that rural wages will keep rising sharply across the continent, the report said.
The study found that up to three quarters of the world’s poorest people, particularly those who earn less than the extreme poverty level of $1.25 a day, live in rural areas.
The report analysed information from the 13 most populous countries in East, South and Southeast Asia.
Reports indicate that in Bangladesh, China, India and Indonesia, rural wages are rising, apparently faster in the second half of the 2000s than before.
“Growth in manufacturing and jobs off the farm, especially construction in cities, is drawing labour off the fields.”
The report showed that agricultural labour productivity rose in all cases except Pakistan in the 2000s, in most countries faster in the latter half of the decade, with seven countries seeing average growth of 2.5% a year or more.
Manufacturing output grew rapidly across most of the region in the 2000s. Growth of manufacturing accelerated between 1997-2004 and 2005-2012 for China, India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, the Philippines and Sri Lanka.
Rising rural wages will push up costs of production in agriculture – already increased by the effect of higher oil prices seen since 2007 – and spur on mechanisation for those tasks where machinery is cheaper than the increased cost of manual operations, the report said.
Research Director at the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies (BIDS) Binayak Sen said: “No doubt, real earning of rural workers has increased over the last 10 years.”
Urbanisation, diversification of crop production, fishing and poultry farming, and partly remittance are the pulling factors for the wage hike in rural areas, he said.
“People are attracted to the city due to urbanisation, tightening labour market in the rural area. This factor substantially has pushed up wages of rural workers.”
In 1980s and 1990s, one third of rural workers remain unemployed, but now situation has changed. Besides traditional paddy cultivation, people cultivate non-rice crops like vegetables round the year.
“We often do not take into account that rural people also started involving with other farming like poultry and fishing,” he said, adding that use of agricultural machinery has also increased in farming because of the wage hike.
“So these are the factors that keep economy going despite many odds.”