Most of the Urdu-speaking people, also known as Biharis, want government-led rehabilitation and ownership of land.
At an exchange-of-views meeting on Tuesday, Mazharul Islam, consultant of the Council of Minorities, said that about 90 per cent of the Urdu-speaking people living in camps across the country wanted to be rehabilitated through government initiatives.
The event, titled 鈥楲ife and land ownership of Urdu-speaking people living in the Adamjee Camp 鈥�, was organised by the Council of Minorities at the auditorium of the Liberation War Museum in the capital.
Mazharul presented the keynote speech, sharing preliminary findings on rehabilitation from an ongoing research involving 500 Urdu-speaking people belonging to the principally Muslim community who migrated to then East Pakistan from their home regions that fell in India as a result of the partition of 1947.
The research found that residents of camps with enough space want rehabilitation within those camps, while those living in overcrowded camps prefer rehabilitation at suitable locations outside, he said.
Out of the 500 respondents, 78 per cent expressed fear of eviction鈥�135 due to government decisions, 99 for lacking land ownership, 60 for living in privately-owned properties (mostly abandoned ones), 43 over risks of relocation or demolition, and 16 for reasons related to drug trade.
Khalid Hussain, chief executive of the Council, said that about 3,00,000 Urdu-speaking people lived in 116 camps across the country.
For generations, they had been living in tiny 64-square-foot single rooms with shared bathrooms, constantly fearing eviction because they did not own the land, he added.
Resom, who currently lived in the Adamjee Camp in Narayanganj, said that four members of her family shared a single room with tin-shed roof, from which water leaked during the monsoon.
She added that there was only one toilet for every two families, no permanent kitchen, and no piped water supply, forcing them to fetch water from a tank inside the camp for all their needs.
As her father was a barber with limited income, she was unable to continue her studies after the eighth grade.
The speakers at the event emphasised the need for government interventions to provide housing and skills development for effective rehabilitation initiatives.聽聽
Nagorik Uddyog CEO Zakir Hossain, Bangladesh Poribesh Andolon joint secretary Md Aminur Rasul Babul, and central committee member of Naripokkho Farida Yasmin also spoke at the event, among others.
