The nation has breathed a sigh of relief as everyday's life has started to return to normal from a suffocative and tense situation for the past few days in which people were mostly left confined within their homes and businesses and factories remained closed.
As a matter of fact, this apocalyptic situation was created after a peaceful student movement for the reform of public sector job quotas turned into country-wide violence with the direct backing and involvement by some opposition political parties.
That had prompted the government to impose a nation-wide curfew from Friday midnight with the deployment of armed forces to assist civil administration to restore law and order throughout the country. Now the curfew was extended for another two days until today (Thursday) but relaxed for seven hours from 10am to 5pm to facilitate the movement of general people.
However, the government did not extend the general holidays after three days. As a result, offices of all the government, semi-government, autonomous bodies and other private organizations started functioning from Wednesday.
Another great relief was the restoration of the broadband Internet services after five days from Tuesday midnight. The Internet outage had actually brought the whole business and communication network to standstill. Internet blackout had isolated the country from the outside world.
Since inter-district transportation has started albeit within limited scale, some perishable agricultural produce and other essential goods have started pouring into Dhaka and other major cities where there have been acute shortages of these items. This is why prices of some essential commodities went up exorbitantly in the urban areas.
Prices of vegetables like chillis, onions, bottled gourds, eddo, long-yard beans and brinjal mainly skyrocketed. For instance, a kg of clillis was sold at Tk 800. Onion is another spice that was priced at higher than expected prices even before the current situation arises despite its bumper production in the country and bulk imports from India too in recent months. A kg of onion was sold on Tuesday in the retail market at around Tk 120.
In this current situation, we have shortage of daily necessary products in the city areas, but we don't have a shortage of some unscrupulous traders who have already taken advantage of the supply disruption situation and fleeced the common consumers by raising prices of the essential kitchen items. Exactly, this has been happening in the retail markets in the capital and other main cities.
We hope that everything will be back to normal and people's woes and sufferings especially those from the low-income groups like day laborers and rickshaw-pullers who depend on daily earnings will come to an end shortly.
