THE RESOURCE STRUCTURE
III. External Non-Agricultural Employment
1: Pattern of Trade
Commerce in rural Bangladesh is structured around sets of temporary markets called hats. Every region is dotted by hat sites, one or another of which operates everyday. Hats generally open in the late afternoon allowing the cultivator and the labourer to attend after the day's work in the fields. Some hats specialise in certain produce. The permanent market, or bazaar. consists usually of a half dozen permanent shops, tea stalls, and the space in front of them for the itinerant traders and producer-retailer. The permanent shops may stay open all day, unless the proprietor choses to market his ware at another bazaar or hat. The bazaar itself opens daily in the late morning and early afternoon hours, Some bazaars specialise as wholesale outlets for certain items.
Each district has its market town, with retail and wholesale shops open all day every day. And then, of course there are the handful of urban centres.
The rural producer, agricultural or non-agricultural, gene-rally retails his produce himself either at a hat or in the bazaars. He may retail his produce directly to a consumer or may be wholesale to the middlemen furia, who canvass the villages, bazaars and hats for produce to be taken to the urban centres. The furia operate at various stages in and with various volumes of trade. At the lowest level of trade are the sub furia. These are the very poor who try to supplement their slim earnings as day-labourers or
whatever with a small profit earned from buying vegetables or eggs in the villages and selling them at the bazaar or hats. They try, that is to usurp some of the sales producers might otherwise make directly themselves. At another level are furia financed by business men or other middlemen. They also canvass door-to- door, and market to market, but their volume of trade is higher and more steady. And then there are furia who come directly from the urban centres to buy for large wholesaler, arotder.
In addition to those who buy hat to hat and village to village, there are the itinerant traders who sell in the same locations.
Many of these traders purchase items wholesale on credit from the market towns to sell to clientele from many villages. Still other traders choose to sell from their own homes to the clientele of one village. Above the itinerant traders are the hat marchants who sell regularly from a hired stall at certain hats on certain days. And then there are the proprietors of the permanent shops who stock groceries (pulses, spices, soap, utensils) and stationery ( hair oil, toilet soap ) and other household items. A few gain the monopoly or dealership for items such as oil.
But let us turn to the hats, the basic unit in the commercial structure of rural Bangladesh. Several hats, as we have said, cater to any one region. Most open one or two known days in a week. At least one hat in a region opens every day of the week.
Most hats open in the late afternoon. The hat consists of a series of small stalls, a few tea stalls, and one or two permanent shops.
The open space in front of the stalls teem with the make-shift displays set up by the itinerant traders and producers.
How is the hat organised? A great majority of them were established and financed by zamindars. After the abolition of the zamindari, these fell under government ownership. And more recently, under a Bangladeshi law all hats are owned by government. The sales tax rights and proprietor rights of the hats are auctioned off for terms of varying lengths by the government.
Most often a single influential person or powerful segment of the community decide the locality needs, say, a school. They bid for the hat in the name of the school. It is generally understood that
no one should bid higher than their bid. Those who win the bid become the hat organisers, and the revenue of the hat goes in part to the school.
The hat organisers allocate the stalls, monitor sales, collects the sales tax. Obviously, it is their interest that the volume of the trade at the hat be high to guarantee the success of the hat. So they balance the trade-off in allocating a certain percentage of the stalls to their village "clients" and the remaining percentage to outsiders who will draw outside customers.
There is then a regional organisation to this form of business.
Those who buy produce, beyond the volume exchanged internally to the region, are the large wholesalers, arotdar, in the urban centre. These operate through the hierarchy of furia. Those who sell products into the region are the wholesalers from the market towns or specialised wholesale bazaars. Their products are sold through itinerant traders and some few permanent shopkeepers who purchase their stock on credit.
Let us turn now to the Dhankura region and describe the hats and bazaars and market towns to which and from which Dhankura residents make their sales and purchases. Dhankura is the site not only of the Union headquarters, but also of a small bazaar.
There are 8 permanent shops. 2 tea stalls, and the open space in front of them. The bazaar opens daily 11 : 00 to 3:00. There is some sale and purchase here of all items produced in Dhankura, except jute, and it is here that the bulk of vegetables (70%) and milk (90%) are sold by Dhankura producers. Most of the fish needed is purchased here.
There are two hats within a mile radius of Dhankura. Each has its own speciality, although most items are exchanged and sold, Coitta hat specialises in winter crops (especially mustard seed) and poultry. Eighty percent of those in the top categories market their winter crops here, and 45% of those in the lower categories.
The top categories consume the large part of their poultry produce, and market only 20% in Coitta. The lower categories market 60% of their poultry in Coitta. Barobhuya hat specialises in
vegetables, rice, and bamboo. Only the top categories can fully exercise their option to use the specialised markets. The lower categories are not free to choose the time, day, or volume of sale.
So although the top categories sell 80% of their rice in Barobhuya, the lower categories sell only 45%.
Saturia ( 6 miles away) was, historically, the wholesale centre for the region, It has been by-passed in importance by Manikganj town with the introduction of the Dhaka-Aricha road. Once a week, there is still a wholesale market in grocery and stationery at Saturia. About one-third of the grocery and stationery purchased by Dhankura residents is purchased there And one-half of the blacksmiths' products are sold at Saturia. Kalampur (5 miles away) is not only a specialised market for cattle, it is the site as well for the government's jute procurement centre. The trade of the jute furia and the sale by private producers of jute will be dis- cussed below. Only a few traders go further than Saturia, one to sell bamboo craft at weekly hat in Savar (28 miles) and some to purchase rice from Nayarhat and fruit from Aricha (19 miles).
Manikganj is the market town for the region. One Hindu, a surplus farmer, runs a permanent shop in Manikganj. Several itinerant traders and permanent shop proprietors buy their stock wholesale on credit from Manikganj.