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Day-labourers are frustrated as they are not getting fair wages for cutting aman paddy at different upazilas in Tangail.
   Although harvest of aman paddy, that began two weeks back, has created job opportunities but labourers are being deprived of fair wages, local sources said.
   Many day-labourers while talking to New Age said the daily wages they are getting from their land owners are much lower than last year’s.
   Mobarak Chhaial, a day-labourer of district sadar upazila, said, ‘we are compelled to sell our labour at low rate due to lack of alternative jobs.’
   ‘The wages we are getting are too meager to maintain our families,’ he added.
   Awal Mia, another labourer, said they had earned Tk 150 per day even in the last harvest season but this year their wages rang from only Tk 70 to Tk 100.
   ‘How can we survive with this poor earning,’ a frustrated Alam said.
   Many labourers had taken loans from local money lenders at high interest rate when they remained jobless during this year’s monsoon. Now, they are repaying loans from the earnings made from cutting paddy.
   ‘If we do not get sufficient money, our families have to pass days in starvation,’ said Awal.
   On the other hand, a good many land owners said they were not deliberately giving them low wages to day-labourers.
   Nur Ali, a land owner of Kalihati upazila, said he had taken loan for aman cultivation. ‘If I spend a large amount of money on harvest I have to sell a significant portion of the yield.
   Aman production is likely to decline in the district this year as a vast track of crop fields in the had been attacked with pests, land owners said.
   Heavy rain in this year’s monsoon is another reason for possible shortfall of aman production, they observed.
   The deputy director of the Department of Agricultural Extension, Tangail, Horipado Gosh, said 1,11,450 hectares of land had been brought under aman cultivation this year with the production target of 2,77,320 tonnes of rice.
   He hopes that the aman production target will be achieved or even the yield could exceed the target this year.
   Arrival of aman paddy in the local markets has little impact on the prices of food grains, according to locals.
   The prices are still high and remain beyond the purchasing capacity of the poor people, they said.

The people in Chapainawabganj municipality area suffer acute scarcity of safe drinking water as the arsenic mitigation water project undertaken four years back is yet be implemented.
   The Chapainawabganj municipality mayor Ataur Rahman, said the government with the financial assistance from the World Bank had undertaken the Tk 100 crore project in 2004-05 fiscal to ensure supply of arsenic-free drinking water to country’s five municipalities including Chapainawabganj, Manikganj, Chandpur, Bagerhat and Chuadanga.
   The project has been approved in the pre-Executive Committee of the National Economic Council meeting, but it has not yet been approved by the ECNEC.
   Later, the Department of Public Health Engineering allocated Tk 1.09 crore for each of the municipalities to meet the demand for safe drinking water.
   The DPHE had planned to install two deep tube wells and 11 kilometre-stretch underground pipelines in the municipality area with the allocated money.
   The department selected a site at Dwariapur and floated tenders in this regard. But, the initiative could not be successful due to the reasons unknown.
   The executive engineer of DPHE, Chapainawabganj, Saifur Rahman, said another WB-funded project titled ‘Bangladesh Water Supply Programme’, has been taken to meet the demand for safe drinking water as the previous one was not implemented.
   An agreement to this effect, has been signed between the government and the World Bank, he said adding that it was approved in the pre-ECNEC meeting on November 3.
   Ataur Rahman said only 36 per cent of the total municipality area has been brought under supply of safe drinking water. But, the authorities could not meet the demand as 14 water pumps, out of 20, are lying inoperative.

Some 507 tuberculosis patients were detected in Natore in the last nine months between January and September this year.
   It was disclosed at a press briefing organised by the LEPRA, Bangladesh at the Natore civil surgeon’s office on Monday.
   The civil surgeon, Dr Md Habibur Rahman, attended as chief guest the briefing chaired by LEPRA district coordinator Md Shakhawat Hossain. TB specialist Dr Khalilur Rahman read out the keynote paper.
   The LEPRA provided free medicines and treatment to the TB patients under the ‘National TB Project’ in cooperation with the Natore civil surgeon’s office, district chest disease hospital and upazila health complexes.
   The patients were given medicines for six to eight months with the help of health assistants, village doctors and local elite.
   The LEPRA conducted tests on coughs of 10,688 suspected patients in which the 507 were diagnosed with TB.
   Meanwhile, 726 patients detected earlier have been fully cured of TB.
   The briefing was also told that the LEPRA had conducted TB awareness programme for 48,410 people through 243 sessions and 55,909 people had been given health education through 2,777 sessions.
   Some 787 people of different professions had been given TB-related training through 35 sessions.

A Rajshahi court on Tuesday sentenced Rajshahi district BNP general secretary, Shish Mohammed, to three years’ rigorous imprisonment for not submitting wealth statement to the Anti-Corruption Commission.
   The judge of the special judge’s court of Rajshahi division Sajedul Karim, also fined the convict Tk 25,000, or in default, to suffer six months more in jail.
   According to the prosecution, the ACC had asked Shish Mohammed to submit his wealth statement.
   As he failed to submit his statement by the deadline fixed by the ACC, Abdul Karim, deputy director of the ACC in Rajshahi, filed a case against him on April 24.
   The police submitted a charge sheet to the court on July 1.
   After examining the documents, the judge of the court pronounced the verdict in absentia.