The New Nation - Internet Edition

BSS, Rangpur

Small-scale tea farming has been changing the overall socio-economic conditions of common people, including marginal farmers and working women, prompting faster growth of the tea sector in Panchagarh.

Officials and experts concerned opined for further government assistance, setting up more tea processing industries, competitive markets at the grassroots for tealeaves and resolving some problems like power crisis for accelerating further growth of the tea sector.

Side by side with the common people, hundreds of females, who lived in utter miseries due to abject poverty, are now changing their fate and achieving self-reliance by earning wages as plucking workers in the tea gardens of the third tea zone of the country.

The growing tea sector has ushered in a new hope for further enhancing the standard of socio-economic life and women empowerment in Panchagarh and adjoining districts in near future, they said.

At present, over 8,000 skilled and unskilled workers, mostly women, have been working in 246 tea gardens, including 18 big estates, 13 medium-size and 215 small-scale gardens set up on about 2,000 acres of land in Tentulia and its surrounding areas.

Small-scale tea growers are now happy as the tea processing factories of Tentulia Tea Company Ltd (TTCL) and Karotoa Tea Garden in Panchagarh area are now purchasing green tealeaves at Taka 11 per kg though the rate was only Taka 9.50 recently.

According to a survey, conducted by Bangladesh Tea Board (BTB), there are 16,000 hectares land suitable for tea farming in Panchagarh area and nearly 2,000 acres have so far been brought under tea farming in the area since 2002.