Being consistent with World Health Organization and also based on Government guidelines, THP (Trillium Health Partners) volunteers of the Hunger Project in Bangladesh has recently shown their glaring success in controlling the corona pandemic in some 1200 selected villages in different regions of Bangladesh. Their volunteers circulated leaflets making the villagers aware of wearing masks, preparing hand sanitizers, providing soap to those villagers of all sections of people in rural areas.
Side by side, the volunteers and workers of Hunger also have established hand-washing stations near to important locations of the villages where the volunteers, elders, women and youth leaders of these selected villages frequently move around. The volunteers spontaneously worked to convince the outsiders to remain in quarantine for at least fourteen days for those who were coming to these villages from outside.
All these villagers worked together with the Hunger volunteers in more than 1200 Village Development Teams (VDTs) identifying and meeting local challenges being supported by the Project staff directly helping them being connected through WhatsApp, text messages, Facebook and other means of communication. Since Bangladesh comprises more than 68,000 villages, we however, require that many other similar organizations should work for bringing resilience for all other villages which are excluded by the Hunger due to insufficient logistic support.
Accordingly, we suggest that BRAC, UNDP, NGO Bureau and many other national and international NGOs in Bangladesh should initiate such programmes being the partners of the Ministry of Local Government and thus administratively assist our people to coordinate similar programs of the THPs both in the villages as well as in urban areas.
In a televised program last year on May 19, titled, ‘COVID-19 Resilient Villages’ organized by the Hunger Project in Dhaka with the Planning Minister Mr. M.A. Mannan as the Chief Guest, we have been able to let the participants realized the significance of such model where according to us a GO-NGO joint partnership may thus work strongly to reach the people at the grass root level with a target to make both the villages and urban communities resilient in terms of COVID-19 pandemic.
There is no denying of the fact that coronavirus pandemic is very fierce in the urban areas, especially in the big cities and towns because of their congested living and inclusive movement of the people. In this context, if we want to make a safer country, we have to provide equal importance to both villages and towns purposefully to make our living pandemic free. Contextually, we may clearly remember that while the first three corona patients were initially detected on March 8, 2020 in Bangladesh, all of them however, were the people who had arrived in the towns and cities from other countries.
Most of these arrivals in the country at that time were from Italy and some other countries where the returnees were not properly quarantined due to their own disliking and protests rejecting to stay stranded in Dhaka for several days after returning home. In fact, that was the beginning of the spread of coronavirus throughout Bangladesh especially by making the urban areas as the loop of contamination and putting it into more vulnerable situation. In this writing, my intention is to make our people aware against the Third Wave of Coronavirus which is just waiting for us in Dhaka, Chittagong, Khulna, Rajshahi, Jessore, Brahmanb aria and a few more bordering cities which might be affected due to their nearness to Indian borders.
We should keep it in mind that Indian variant of COVID-19 is detected to be very dangerous and World Health Organization categorically reminded us of the intricacy of this variant where they blamed Prime Minister Narendra Modi for hosting mass political and religious gatherings in the country several times. In this context, our Prime Minister’s role has rather been applauded by the outsiders, for taking right decisions in right times.
In this context, we urge our Prime Minister once again to keep our borders closed for few months more, until and unless the whole situation in India comes down at a full stop. Indian variant of the COVID is suspected to spread at a geometrically progressive rate for which we have to be more cautious because we are the most densely populated country of the world which is always at a full risk.
Being a neighbor of India, we however, have to provide all our moral and logistic support to our Indian brothers and sisters at this critical situation so that they can return to their normal life; appreciatively, our government has already responded to this crisis by providing some medicinal support to India.
Based on the above, I now want to return to my earlier discussion which was designed to provide an idea in regard to protecting both rural and urban areas by making the people fully resilient at the community level and accordingly, we suggest some future strategies which might be adopted in this context. As the THP programs of Hunger Project are providing their voluntary support to some selected villages, I urge our Local Government Ministry to innovate such models where the urban areas with the support of the community people may work voluntarily for their resilience at the neighborhood level.
And the City Corporations in different urban areas of the country may take the lead in organizing people from all sectors to get involved in such activities. We clearly remember that our Local Government Minister, Mr. Tajul Islam at the middle of last year worked with his own innovation of distributing food and other necessities to all the needy people with assistance and cooperation of BRAC, UNDP and other organizations; now similarly, the same model could again be adopted in a little different manner for community resilience at the in major towns and cities.
A group of volunteers under the leadership of local ward commissioners, teachers and students may work together providing all technical knowledge about COVID rules and thus also will convince the local people to follow them very strictly to create resilience in their own communities. While looking at Kerala success stories of controlling coronavirus, we find that it was entirely initiated by the Rapid Response Teams formed under the leadership of Ward Commissioners where they mobilized and brought together the whole community to halt this pandemic with all sincerity and cooperation.
We suggest that our Ward Commissioners organize social mobilization programmes generating knowledge on social distancing, having explained the utility of wearing mask, advising them to refrain from spitting on the streets, suggesting them not to cough on some one’s face which will eventually benefit their living in the community in a concerted effort to face this catastrophic COVID-19 pandemic. We always have to remember that if we can not the control the virus in the towns and cities, we certainly will fail in controlling it in the villages for which it is suggested that we move with an integrated model of making both of them simultaneously resilient for our survival.
Prof Dr. A.H.M. Zehadul Karim is a former Vice Chancellor of a public university in Bangladesh, now teaches at Jagannath University