Living on neighbours' kindness, charity

When clouds move over Kishoreganj upazila of Nilphamari district in northern Bangladesh, Durgacharan Roy, 60, starts getting ready. He drags old clothing into a corner, gathers whatever polythene he can find, and waits.

The tin roof begins to hammer. Water finds the holes–there are many– and seeps through. By the time the storm is done, the floor is submerged to the knee.

"When the storms come, I sit in a corner with clothes and polythene over my head," he says. "What else can I do?"

He is over 60, lives alone, and has for more than a decade occupied a shack on the embankment of an irrigation canal in Madhyapara village, Nilphamari district. Calling it a shelter is generous. The walls are rusted tin sheets, palm fronds, plastic bags, old sacks, torn mosquito netting– whatever was available, pressed together.

Cold winds in winter pass straight through. Snakes come in through the gaps. So do frogs, insects, rainwater. The room offers the idea of shelter more than the reality of it.

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He and his late wife settled here about twelve years ago. Landless, with nowhere else to go, the canal embankment was what they could get. His wife died a decade back. His son married, moved away, and the contact thinned out and then stopped entirely.

"I don't know where he is now," Durgacharan says. Just that, quietly.

He worked as a day labourer for years–the kind of work where you are paid only for the days your body cooperates. His body stopped cooperating. Now he has no income at all. He eats when neighbours bring something. When they don't, he doesn't eat.

"Whatever people give me, I eat," he says. "If nobody gives me anything, I stay hungry."

Moli Rani, who lives nearby, confirms it matter-of-factly. "He cannot eat properly. Whatever neighbours provide, he eats. Otherwise he has nothing." Harikrishna Roy puts it simply: "The government should stand beside him. People who have the ability should also help."

Bangladesh runs an elderly allowance programme–monthly payments for low-income citizens over 60. Millions receive it. Durgacharan qualifies by every measure that should count.

He has applied. Multiple times. He has walked to government offices, asked local elected representatives, and waited for answers that did not come.

"I've applied many times," he says. "Nobody has given it to me. There's been no answer."

His roof leaks because repairs cost money he doesn't have. His meals depend on whoever happens to feel generous that day. He knows this clearly, without self-pity, as simple fact: "How can I repair the house when I cannot even find food?"

After journalists raised his case, local officials responded. The upazila social welfare officer said he was looking into the matter and would try to get Durgacharan enrolled in government programmes quickly. The UNO said officials would assess the situation and pursue available schemes through social services and the union parishad.

These are not bad answers. They are just very late ones.

Bangladesh's welfare architecture has grown considerably over two decades. Elderly allowances, widow payments, disability support–the coverage, on paper, is real. But the system works through local administration, and local administration works through visibility. You have to be known. You have to have someone who will put your name forward. You have to be able to navigate offices that are not always easy to navigate.

For the landless, the isolated, the socially peripheral–the people the programmes were ostensibly built for–that last step can be the impossible one.

Durgacharan has been making that case for years, getting nowhere. Old enough to qualify. Poor enough to qualify. Invisible enough to fall through anyway.

As evening comes in over Madhyapara, he goes back to the shack by the canal.

"I am a very poor man," he says. A pause. "This sorrow–who do I tell it to?"