How impoverished women keep the Nakugaon Port alive
Approximately 3,000 day labourers – mostly women – work gruelling hours at the stone crushing sites at Nakugan Port for Tk250 daily
For Zubeda, the day began with uncertainty.
As per usual, she arrived at the stone crushing field, adjacent to the Nakugaon Land Port at 5 am. At first, there was no work for her at the site she worked a few days back. After a couple of attempts, she struck a deal at another stone crushing site to work for the day.
The day labourers at the stone crushing sites in Nakugaon Port have, perhaps, the most fleeting sense of job security. They show up at the sites with pounding hearts, unsure about whether they will get work.
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So what does Zubeda have to do as a day labourer? She carries cobbles – broken off from boulders – to a crusher and when the cobbles break down into pebbles, she again carries and piles them up elsewhere.
With mountains of boulders and pebbles lining both sides of the port road, these stone crusher sites stand on razed croplands. A few good trees still stand high here and there, as a respite from the heat and gruelling labour work for the sun-tanned labourers.
The 45-year-old Zubeda looked tired and hungry. "Does any happy person do this kind of job? We have no option but to do this."
Zubeda's husband Abdus Sobhan abandoned her when their second daughter was born with special needs. Every weekday, this mother commutes from a distant Baromari village and works hard to meet her family's needs. She is required to lift heavy stones to pay for her elder daughter's education, who is pursuing a 3-year honours degree at the moment.
Most of the local people said women labourers make up for 80% of the labour force in particular. Why is that? Because men are unwilling to sell labour at such a cheap price.
According to Nakugaon Land Port-based Exporters-Importers Association, more than 1 lakh tonnes of rocks were imported, and importers paid Tk4 crore as custom duty, till the third quarter of the current fiscal year. The revenue was highest compared to the last couple of fiscal years, and women labourers played a major role in this growth.
"If you visit the place at the end of a workday, you find them returning home as garment workers do in Dhaka," said Noor Hossain, 57, who runs a grocery shop just beside the Nakugaon Land Port Road.
Noor is also among the stakeholders of the stone import business. He has rented out his 18-shatak land to an importer for Tk90,000 a year.
Noor's spacious shop is a gathering spot for local men of different ages. The older men looked for betel leaf while young labourers and children mostly bought chilling 'energy drinks.' They chatted loudly amid the deafening mechanical noise of the stone crushers.
"There are at least 100 stone crushers here, each requires 30 workers. With hammers, men break the boulders into cobbles while the women feed those into the crushers," Noor explained.
Like Zubeda, around 3,000-day labourers work at the stone crushing sites from 6:00 am to 1:00 pm, for a paltry daily wage of Tk250, fixed for all – male or female labourers. The word "site" is loosely used in this story to mean enterprise. And at the port, one enterprise usually owns and operates one stone crusher.
Of interrupted trade and meagre daily wage
Although the Nakugaon Land Port, 200 kilometres north of the capital city Dhaka, was officially launched in 2015, local businesses imported rocks from India since the Pakistani period. The import activities stopped during the Indo-Pakistani War in 1965.
In 1997, the import of coal and rocks started again on a limited scale. How much daily wage the labourers made at that time could not be verified independently. However, some labourers said they received Tk100 as a daily wage since the port got its official status. Later, the wage was raised to Tk180 and then Tk250, as a consequence of the day labourers collectively demanding better wages. This happened just before the pandemic hit in 2020.
Local traders claim that the quality of the imported stones available in the Nakugaon area is among the best in Bangladesh. Better quality means harder work for the labourers, because then it takes more time and labour to process the stones.
After the port was launched officially, import of rocks halted for some external reasons, resulting in unemployment among the poor labourers. This happened a number of times.
However, since Bhutan started exporting rocks to Bangladesh, supply has remained uninterrupted, and the same has been true for employment opportunities.
The women of the stone-crushing sites
Is the stone crushing job an opportunity for women? Perhaps, yes. But they do this hard work as the region they live in offers only a few other alternative earning sources for women.
The labourers come from near and distant villages including Kalakuma, Tandar, Ramchandrapura, Hatibazar, Nakugaon, Manupara, Andharpara, Chandpia, Noyabeel, Aambagan, Sondhyagora, Mayakhasi and others.
Out of the meagre wage they receive, Tk40-Tk60 is spent on daily transport costs.
Mursheda stepped into the stone crushing work five years ago when her husband Mojibur died. Mojibur left behind an old mother Hazera, Mursheda and two children. Sahara's husband Suruz Ali died when their only child was merely 40 days old. 53-year-old Mehogi Garo has been working in the field for the last four years since her husband Phorik Garo became bedridden.
The women wore either printed saree or salwar kameez. Their clothes looked overused and dust-covered. They usually had two pieces of gamchha [towel] – one wrapped around the waist and the other for making a turban to carry weighty cobbles and pebbles over their head.
When their shift ended, the labourers were in a rush to return home. And why not? They have to get up by 3 to 4am.
Usually, they cook rice and lentils. And someone who can wake up even earlier can manage the time to prepare additional food, like mashed potatoes or mixed vegetables. Then they pack the food for breakfast, which they will take at the 10 am break. By this time, the food gets cold.
Firoza, one of the labourers, appeared suddenly and assumed that I was a government official. She asked me to add her name to the 'relief' list. When she learned that I would not be of assistance, she became reluctant to talk to a journalist.
"What's the benefit of sharing our plight?" she questioned.
Firoza's husband Shafiqul left her and their two children for another woman. He never returned. But poverty never left Firoza's side. Her day-labourer elder son could not even afford meals for his own two kids. So, grandmother, Firoza took up work.
Evidently, there is no one willing to champion the welfare of the workers whom Nakugaon Land Port Exporters-Importers Association rely on, and in turn, generate a high volume of revenue from trade. "SometiSmes, workers get injured but there are no health facilities within a 13 km radius of this area," said another grocery shop owner Fahmida.
A number of importers said that due to the lack of cheaper transport and banking facilities, they cannot expand the market of rocks processed in the Nakugaon area. Otherwise, they could pay the labourers a bit higher wage.
Nazmul Enterprise's business partner Nasim, and Apurba Trade International manager Rafiqul Islam, said they supply stones mostly to under-construction projects around the Mymensingh division.
Nakugaon Land Port Exporters-Importers Association President Mustafizur Rahman Mukul elaborated, "Only 70-80 rock-laden trucks arrive here a day. That number is minimal if you compare the volume with the Benapole Port. The Port Authority [under the Shipping Ministry] has listed 18 products importable through Nakugaon. But we have clearance for only two: rock and coal. If we could import more products, the labourers would get more income opportunities," Mustafizur said.
The association has appealed to all the concerned authorities, including the NBR and the Commerce Ministry, to allow the import of more products as listed by the Shipping Ministry, but received no green signal yet.
