Monomi Begum, a Shewrapara slum-dweller, had to return home empty-handed after waiting for around one and a half hours on Sunday to buy rice from the Open Market Sales point in that city area.
‘My husband is a rickshaw-puller. His earns so little with which it is really hard to buy rice from the market, where coarse rice sells for Tk 34 to 36 a kilogram. The price is really beyond the reach of people like us,’ Monomi said.
She arrived at the OMS outlet just before 1:00pm after preparing the lunch for her household.
‘But, like more than 100 others, I am going back home empty-handed as all the sacks of rice on the lorry were sold by 2:30pm,’ she told New Age.
Hundreds of low-income group people met with a similar fate on the day as most of the truck-mounted OMS outlets in the city ran out of stocks by midday, well ahead of the scheduled end of sales at 5:00pm.
Queues at the 81 OMS points in city have been getting longer by the day since the food directorate launched the OMS Programme on December 25 as the retail price of coarse rice on the market had continued to rise.
One is supposed to be able to buy five kilos of coarse rice from an OMS outlet at the rate of Tk 24 per kg between 9:00am and 5:00pm every week day. Each of the 81 truck-mounted outlets has been selling about three tonnes of rice a day to around 600 buyers.
But, a large number of low-income group people, including rickshaw-pullers, street vendors, garment workers, small shopkeepers, and slum dwellers, complained on Sunday that they had failed to buy rice from the Karwanbazar, Kazipara, Shewrapara, Mirpur Section-1, and Bawnia embankment OMS outlets in the afternoon after standing in queues for hours.
‘I will have to buy rice from the market at a rate at least Tk 10 more per kilo than that of the OMS outlets. It will force me to cut the amounts of other commodities I intended to buy. Those commodities also have turned dearer,’ said Md Abdul Aziz, one of the 15 to 20 people who failed to buy OMS rice from the Kazipara point, where the stocks finished at around 4:00pm.
‘The demand for OMS rice has been increasing every day due to the rice price hike on the market and this is the main reason for the stocks getting finished much before the closing time of 5:00pm,’ food inspector Md Delwar Hossain explained to New Age on Sunday afternoon.
According to the OMS control room, at present a total of 243 tonnes of rice is sold every day from 81 truck-mounted sales outlets in the city.
A salesman at the OMS outlet at Mirpur Section-1 however said their entire stocks had been getting sold out ahead of time every day. He said the government should increase the number of outlets to ensure OMS of rice to all low income group people.
When asked, director general of food directorate Ahmad Hossain Khan told New Age, ‘We will increase the number of OMS outlets in the city to 100 in a day or two,’ to meet the increasing demand and make up for the shortfall in supply.
