Overseas money buoys life in Bangladesh village

SHAHABAZPUR, Bangladesh (Reuters) - Mohammad Majnu Miah has bought some land and rebuilt his house, in which a television and CD player take pride of place, thanks to the remittances his wife and son send him from the Maldives, where they have worked for six years.

The money comes to roughly 30,000 taka($400) a month, a small fortune in a nation where one-third of the population survives on $1.25 a day -- and is a big part of why some villages, like Shahabazpur, are slowly crawling out of the grinding poverty that grips 30 percent of the Bangladeshi people.

"I have to manage and invest their income here at home. Using their hard-earned money in a meaningful way is not an easy task," Majnu said. "I plan on buying a refrigerator soon."

Shahabazpur, which lies around 150 km (90 miles) east of the Bangladeshi capital of Dhaka and about half a kilometer from the bank of the Meghna river, now has three primary schools, at least six mosques, a community clinic, and dirt and asphalt roads connecting many homes.

Most of its 5,500 residents are much better off than they were a decade ago. They grow enough rice and vegetables to feed their families, have savings to support their other needs, and dress in new clothes for festivals and social occasions.

The secret is the remittances from people working abroad, said Abdul Wahid, a village bank employee.

"The money from expatriates is the main source of income for many families," he said. Roughly a thousand villagers currently work abroad.

They are not alone. More than 7 million Bangladeshis are spread all over the globe, doing everything from running food courts and staffing shops, to tilling land in African nations and tending fruit gardens in the deserts of the Mideast.

They send home roughly $11 billion annually, according to central bank and Bureau of Statistics data, a key earner for a nation whose 2010-2011 GDP came in at $100 billion.

This income, plus some $18 billion in exports of readymade garments, has helped lift nearly 13 million people out of poverty over the five years to 2010, government officials said.

"HANDSOME" AMOUNT OF MONEY

Salahuddin Ahmed, a 60-year-old resident of Shahabazpur, said he worked in Singapore for five years in the early 1980s and came back with "a very handsome" amount of money. Two of his sons and a son-in-law currently work there as well.

"There is hardly any family in our village without one or two members employed abroad -- including in Malaysia, Singapore, Europe and the Middle East."

Most of the money goes into buying land, building new houses and investing in small businesses.

In the village, newly set up tea and grocery shops buzz with customers from morning to late evening every day. One seller said he made up to 10,000 taka ($130) a month.

Families that for generations had never sent a child to school are now able to educate nearly all the children born in the last 10 years, and the village is almost free of beggars, said Nasiruddin Sarkar, the village union council chairman.

"Until recently, the few well-off villagers used to keep some rice or wheat in sacks to give to the beggars. Now they seldom have one knocking at their doors," he said.

But the flow of money is not without problems.

Managing a business from afar is often difficult, and in some cases relatives entrusted with the day-to-day work end up stealing much of the money. Villagers also speak of social woes such as young people who take to drugs and alcohol.

Overall, though, the positive outweighs the negative. Even the handful of people who don't own land or have family working abroad say that things are better, with the rich more eager to dole out money to the poor.

Council chairman Nasiruddin Sarkar said that ideally, he would prefer slower change to avoid some of the problems.

"Still, despite the bad things, I must say life in the countryside is changing for the good," he added.

(Additional reporting by Ruma Paul; editing by Elaine Lies)