Writer : Monir Ibn Hafiz
Price hike is a common phenomenon in Bangladesh. In Ramadan it becomes worse than the rest of the times of the year. Nowadays, life is becoming much worse day by day because of the high prices of essentials where most of the people earn a fixed income. People face a serious problem in balancing all spheres of their life as they are to spend more amount of money on essentials. The sufferings of the low wage-earners are beyond description.
When we think about the causes of price hike, some terms come to our mind — profiteering, hoarding, lack of proper market monitoring, high demand, lack of proper market monitoring, little applications of laws etc. Among these, profiteering and hoarding are the main culprits of price hike.
Profiteering is the activity of deliberately making too big a profit, especially by exploiting people at different times like during a war or famine — in our country, during the Ramadan, natural disaster and other crisis moments. Businesspersons form syndicates and charge exorbitantly high price instead of fair price.
Hoarding is another cause of price hike. It is a deliberate effort to create crisis of goods in the market to push up their demand. Thus, the product is marketed at a higher price and people are bound to buy the product at that higher price to satisfy their demand. An the time of natural disaster, shortage of supply creates price hike as the people want to procure things at any cost.
Other causes of price hike are mentioned in the following diagram which represents the cause-effect analysis:
It is generally suggested that to control price hike the government should take several steps like monitoring the market frequently and hanging price lists in the bazaars. Such steps have been proved to be of not much effect in controlling price hike. It seems that there is a problem with the ethics of the businessman.
Moral values and the sense of social belongingness should be developed among the businessmen. It is shocking that during the Ramadan, prices increase manifold in our country. In the Middle East, businessmen reduce the prices of essentials during the Ramadan in the hope of getting reward from Allah (SWT). In Europe, people buy more products and services during the Christmas, and prices of products and services remain low. Can we imagine such a situation in our country during the Eid, pooja, Christmas or in other religious festivals?
We should promote moral values and business ethics. The mass media, government, politicians and religious leaders can play a vital role in this regard by undertaking mass awareness campaigns among all classes of people, particularly the businessmen.
We need moral filter as well as some effective measures to control price hike. We can say like Barack Obama “change we need”. Yes, change we need in our social structure.
The writer is a student in management studies at Dhaka University. He can be reached at: monir_du25@yahoo.com
Tags: ethics, inflation, morality, price hike