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Govt begins survey on poverty for PRSP

STAFF CORRESPONDENT
New Age
29.03.2004

The government has started the process of a monitoring survey on the country’s poverty scenario to get the latest data for preparing the final version of donor-prescribed Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP).

The initial report of the Poverty Monitoring Survey-2004 will be available by next July and final one by October-November before fine-tuning the PRSP within December this year, a function was informed on Saturday.

According to the survey manual, the report will focus on demography and environment of households, income and expenditure, land ownership, resources and savings, loans, and crises and remedies.

The survey will cover 250 enumeration areas –– 85 urban and 165 rural –– based on random samplings numbering at 7,500 households, a process that is planned to help draw the up-to-date poverty line.

Different aspects of the survey were discussed at the opening ceremony of a two-day training programme on the survey for 22 regional survey officers (RSOs) under the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) at BBS Bhaban. The RSOs will provide training to field level officers next month for conducting the survey.

“Information is the basis for this work and its inputs will be important for accuracy of the government’s PRSP now awaiting finalisation,” Salehuddin Md. Musa, joint secretary at the statistics unit of the Planning Commission, said and urged the officials to maintain quality of the data.

After having a real picture of the poverty and its various dimensions from the survey, the General Economic Division (GED) under the Planning Commission will use the data in the PRSP preparation.

The BBS officials also told the function that in most cases, the people were found unwilling to disclose their income although they used to give some ideas of their expenditure. Nowadays, the ways of expense has changed with the use of latest communications media like cellular phone, Internet and satellite televisions.

Chaired by BBS director general AKM Musa, the inaugural session was also addressed by BBS deputy director general Abdur Rashid Sikder and project director Fayez Uddin Ahmed.

Source: http://www.newagebd.com