Tenants are going through hard times because of the spiralling costs of house rent in the capital as well as the common practice of house owners to evict tenants without giving them notices.
The House Rent Contract Act 1991 is proving to be ineffective in protecting tenants as very few of them apply to the ‘controller’ for a determination of what should be the ‘standard rent’ for the premises where they are living, or for an order preventing eviction.
The controller can only intervene to set a ‘standard’ rent or prevent eviction only when a tenant or a landlord applies.
Although the Dhaka City Corporation prepares and updates a house rent chart, this only determines how much tax a landlord should pay and does not assist tenants in stopping landlords from increasing rent.
Experts suggested that a rent controller should be appointed for each ward, that maximum rents for particular areas should be gazetted, and that all rents should be paid through banks.
‘There is the House Rent Control Act 1991 but it is not effective,’ the Consumers Association of Bangladesh president, Quazi Faruque, told New Age.
As a result, the house owners are raising the house rents according to their whim, he said.
He said that tenants do not go to rent controllers as many do not know of their existence, and even if they do, it is a complicated process which can create difficulties with the landlord and they often do not have the documents necessary to make an application.
He said that it was very difficult to find out how many rent controllers had been appointed in Dhaka.
Faruque said that the house rent act is not for the protection of tenants who suffer, like the shuttle of a weaving machine, moving from house to house.
Rumana, a housewife who now lives in the Pathapath area, had lived from 2003 to 2010 in a three bedroom house at Rampura at a rent of Tk 9,000. From 2008, the house owner started to increase the rent by Tk 1000 every year and, finally forced her to leave the house.
She told New Age that she had then shifted to Panthapath but that their sufferings did not end there.
Now her family is living in an apartment where the house rent is Tk 21,000 for a three-bed apartment and the service charge is Tk 3,000.
They are charging money for service charge without providing any service, she said.
The failure of the lift to operate is a big problem as they have some aged family members who cannot walk up to the 9th floor without a lift.
She said that she had decided to leave the house and search for a new one.
House owners do not want to allow tenants to stay for many years and the landlord creates problems regarding water, electricity and other services to force them to leave, she said.
Kamal Ahmad, a private university accountant, used to spend half of his salary Tk 7000 taka on paying house rent for a single-room family house at Uttara.
He said, ‘When we left the house, the owner refused to pay back the advance money, saying that they needed the money to repair the house damaged when we lived there.’
‘How will the fixed income people survive in this city with soaring house rent. No one bothers with this problem,’ Kamal said.
According to a 2010 report of the Consumers Association of Bangladesh, house rent in Dhaka increased by 20 per cent in 2010, 15 per cent in 2009, 21 per cent in 2008, 21.5 per cent in 2007, and 14 per cent in 2006.
The Dhaka City Corporation’s deputy chief revenue officer Mohsin Ali said that according to the house rent act, it is the rent controller, not the city corporation, which is responsible for determining appropriate rents.
A DCC official said that the corporation’s involvement in the preparation of the house rent chart is only to assist it in collecting holding taxes from landlords.
Manzill Murshid, president of the non-government organisation Human Rights and Peace for Bangladesh, said that house rent transactions should have to be done through banks.
He also said that house rent controllers should be appointed area-wise and the government should fix the rent and publish it as a gazette.
He urged the government to control the spiralling house rent by forming a review committee which will renew the rent every three years.
The cabinet secretary, M Abdul Aziz, told New Age at the end of July that the government had a plan to amend the House Rent Control Act 1991.
-With New Age input
