At least 10 to 15 Rohingya women are giving births to their children daily at a single health facility at Ukhiya with many of them being underage and coming with complications due to malnutrition.
‘We are having 10 to 15 Rohingya mothers giving births to their children at this health centre daily. Half of them have normal deliveries. The monthly figure is around 400 on an average,’ said Kazi Golam Rasul, senior director and head of health at Friendship Hospital at Ukhiya, as a delegation including foreign diplomats, politicians, government officials and journalists visited the Rohingya camp on Tuesday.
He told New Age that many of the newborns’ mothers were underage while many others also come with different complications after trying for normal deliveries at camp houses.
He said that child marriage was a common phenomenon in Rohinygya camps and many of the pregnant women suffer from malnutrition.
Rohingya community member Mohammad Yunus, 51, said that he entered Bangladesh in 2017 amid atrocities by Mayanmar military in their Rakhine state. ‘We are 10 in number in my family. We have eight children — four daughters and four sons,’ he said at Kutupalong camp.
He said that like most of them in the camp he had no livelihood there and they depended on reliefs for living.
Officials said that number of Rohingyas was increasing fast as they were not used to any birth-control methods.
Addressing the Stakeholders’ Dialogue on Rohingya Situation as chief guest in beach town Cox’s Bazar on Monday, interim government chief adviser Professor Muhammad Yunus said that the number of Rohingya people reached 13 lakhs with 32,0000 new births yearly.
He rolled out a seven-point proposal for a sustainable solution to the protracted Rohinhya crisis before the stakeholders that included representatives from international agencies.
Not a single Rohingya returned to their homeland Rahhine since the biggest ever exodus in 2017 when nearly eight lakh Rohingyas entered Bangladesh for shelter.
