During the Eid-ul-Fitr holiday, 53 lakh 54 thousand 832 SIMs left Dhaka in three days from last Tuesday. And 19 lakh five thousand 902 people entered. Out of this, 20 lakh 69 thousand 857 Banglalink SIM holders have gone outside Dhaka. The second highest number of 18 lakh 74 thousand 721 Robi SIM holders went outside the capital. Grameenphone, the country’s largest mobile phone operator, had 17 lakh 30 thousand 117 SIMs. And state owned mobile phone operator Teletalk SIM number was 81 thousand 137.
Banglalink surpasses other three mobile operators in entering Dhaka as well as leaving the city. In three days, 12 lakh 39 thousand 823 SIMs of this operator entered the capital. 3 lakh 89 thousand 283 SIMs of Grameen Phone, 2 lakh 56 thousand 32 SIMs of Robi and 30 thousand 764 SIMs of Teletalk have arrived in Dhaka in these three days.
The Posts and Telecommunications Minister Mustafa Jabbar conveyed the information in his Facebook post on Friday.
The number of SIMs showed by the minister exposed that maximum 6 lakh 67 thousand 783 SIMs entered Dhaka on Tuesday, 6 lakh 32 thousand 522 on Wednesday and 6 lakh 5 thousand 597 on Thursday. Conversely, 12 lakh 28 thousand 278 SIMs left Dhaka on Tuesday, 16 lakh 72 thousand 645 SIMs on Wednesday and 24 lakh 53 thousand 909 SIMs on Thursday.
In comparison, last year before Eid-ul-Azha, 66 lakh went out of Dhaka in two days. In 2021, 7.3 million SIMs went before Eid-ul-Fitr.
However, it is not possible to get the actual number of people leaving Dhaka by calculating this SIMs. Because, it is by no means the ‘real number’ of people returning home.
Children without mobile phones are left out of this calculation. According to the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics, the number of children under the age of 14 in the country is 27.7 percent of the total population.
Many people use multiple SIMs. As a result, the exact number of people who left Dhaka is not available. But comparing with the previous years, the difference is clear.
A few days before Eid-ul-Azha of 2021, 1 crore 4 lakh 94 thousand 683 SIMs were released from Dhaka by the Minister of Communications. The minister said that more than 7.3 lakh SIMs went out of Dhaka in four days before Eid-ul-Fitr that year.
According to the World Population Review, the population of Dhaka is now around 200 million. Out of this, more than 100 million people were believed to go to some other district during Eid. But the actual number will be never known.
