Present Status of Socio-economic Conditions of the Fishing Community of the Meghna River Adjacent to Narsingdi District, Bangladesh

Abstract

The present study was carried out to assess the livelihood status of traditional fishing community of the Meghna River adjacent to Narsingdi District from September 2015 to March 2016. Data were collected through the well-structured questionnaire survey from Noyapara, Daspara, Birpur and Boiddamara char close to Meghna River. A total of 100 fishermen were selected randomly for interview. The findings of the present study revealed some interesting facts and showed most of the fishermen were Hindus (63%) belong to the age group of 24-45 years. Almost 71% of the fishermen were illiterate and got medical help mainly from village doctors (80%). It was found from the investigation that most of the houses were kacha (65%) and with poor sanitation facilities. For coping with adverse situation most of them (85%) take loan from somiti (Asha). There was a prevalent relationship of contentment of fishermen, children's school, taking risk at work, electricity facilities and medical facilities with the fishing income that was analyzed by One Way ANOVA (SPSS v.22) as the alpha level (p<0.05). Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was done to isolate variables that may be sufficient for socioeconomic study and Correlation matrix was done to find out the relation among variables.

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“…Similar illiteracy rate (63 %) of fishers was also reported for fishing community in Assam by [19], whereas [22] reported it as 72.1 %. According to [23] the socio-economic conditions of the fishing community of Meghna River adjacent to Narsingdi district of Bangladesh were illiterate (71 %) as they have low income and minimal facility for education. In Kanyakumari district of India, a similar observation was made for mussel fishermen (68.7 % illiteracy) [24].…”