Bogura's Tk 4 Crore Fruit Market at Tinmatha Lies Unused

In July 2023, at Satmatha, the heart of Bogura town in northern Bangladesh, residents were worn down by the traffic that built up every morning around the wholesale fruit market. A modern fruit market built two years earlier for Tk 4 crore at Tinmatha, on the edge of town, was meant to clear that congestion. By the middle of 2023 it was standing largely unused: a section of the fruit traders said wholesale sales would be lower there and refused to move, while the municipality, the police and the district administration said steps would be taken to relocate the trade.

Every day at first light the fruit bazar comes alive with the shouts of buyers and sellers. The wholesale fruit market sits on Station Road, one of the busiest roads in Bogura town. According to traders, the fruit quarter there had 39 permanent and eight temporary wholesale depots, known locally as arats, and on an average day around Tk 2 crore worth of fruit changed hands. From the early hours until noon, boxes of mango, jackfruit, banana, litchi and other fruit were sorted, weighed and sold on in bulk to retailers and to buyers from across the district.

The main road ran right in front of the depots. Trucks and vehicles carrying fruit were loaded and unloaded on the carriageway itself, while wholesale trading went on alongside, so that the whole stretch was taken over by the trade. The result was a severe jam from Satmatha through the fruit quarter to the railway station and on to Tinmatha. Everyone from school and college students to office workers was held up for long periods each morning. For the residents of Satmatha, described as the heart of the town, the daily congestion had become part of life.

It was to break that cycle that a market had been built away from the centre. The idea was simple: move the wholesale fruit trade, with its trucks and porters, out of the crowded core and give it a purpose-built site with room to work.

Relocating a wholesale market out of a congested town centre is a familiar remedy across Bangladesh's growing district towns, where daily loading and unloading on narrow roads collides with school, office and through traffic. The reasoning at Bogura was the same: a dedicated site at Tinmatha, with space for trucks and porters off the main carriageway, would take the heaviest movements away from Satmatha. The sticking point, as the dispute showed, was not the building but whether buyers and the full body of traders would follow the trade to its new address.

The modern market at Tinmatha was built at a cost of Tk 4 crore with funding from the traders' association. It had a canteen, toilets, enough space for loading and unloading and other facilities. Sixty shops were allotted against the town's 47 fruit depot owners. Of them, 31 traders took shops after paying advances ranging from Tk 2 lakh to Tk 10 lakh. The market was inaugurated on 11 March. Yet months later the trade had not shifted, and, in the words of the report, the initiative was being held up by a handful of traders who would not move.

One trader, Hossain, had taken a shop at the new market with a deposit of Tk 8.5 lakh. He said he had done so with security in mind, and that he stood to lose a great deal of money if the trade did not move there. For traders like him, who had already locked up large advances, the empty market was a direct financial worry.

The traders who were reluctant gave practical reasons. Mosharaf Abdul Hannan, a fruit trader, said Tinmatha was far from the town centre; wholesale buyers did not want to travel there, and vans and porters were hard to find. He said they would move if they were given a place nearby.

Another trader, Atoar Rahman, pointed to safety. He said they would suffer losses after dark, because money was collected from wholesalers and the accounts were settled at the depots, and it was not safe to move around the Tinmatha area carrying that much cash. These were the arguments of the traders who stayed on Station Road; they were not accepted by everyone in the trade.

Shafiqul Islam Arfan, senior vice-president of the Bogura Fruit Traders' Association, put the opposite case. He said a shop that rented for Tk 50,000 in the town cost only Tk 7,000 to Tk 8,000 at the new market, and that if everyone moved together the buyers would certainly follow. In his account the lower rent and a shared move were reasons the shift could work; the division within the trade was between those who wanted to move and those who did not.

The municipality, which had to see the move through, described a stalled leasing process. Municipal executive officer Shahajahan Alam said the municipality was in the process of leasing out the new fruit market, but that notices had been published twice without a single application, and a third notice had now been issued. He attributed the lack of interest in the lease to the traders' own reluctance to shift.

Bogura's additional superintendent of police (administration), Snigdha Akhtar, said moving the traders was the municipality's responsibility, but that action on the traffic jams would be taken quickly. The deputy commissioner, Saiful Islam, said steps would be taken to move the market: traders would be sent letters within a set time, and if they still did not move, an eviction drive would follow. No side, in the report, said the market itself was unfit; the dispute was over whether and how the trade would move to it.

Satmatha, the junction the fruit quarter takes its bearings from, is the recognised centre of Bogura, one of the main towns of northern Bangladesh. According to Banglapedia, Bogura town was founded in 1850 and its municipality dates from 1884. The town grew on the banks of the Karatoya, the river that flows south past it before joining the Bangali.

The Karatoya was once a far greater river than it is today. According to Banglapedia, it was formerly the main channel of the Tista and may have been a distributary of the Brahmaputra; a medieval chronicle recorded that around 1115 AD it was about three times the size of the Ganges. The river was sacred to Hindus, its name taken from kar, hand, and toa, water, for the water poured on Shiva's hands at his marriage to Parvati. After a great flood in 1820 the river declined sharply, and the Bogra-Karatoya now carries a maximum discharge of under 3,000 cusecs. The town that grew beside this shrunken river became a trading centre whose markets, including the Station Road fruit quarter, serve a wide rural hinterland.

Bogura's place in the region goes back far beyond its modern markets. About 13 km north of the town stand the ruins of Mahasthangarh, the earliest and largest archaeological site in Bangladesh and the remains of the ancient city of Pundranagara, set on the bank of the same Karatoya. According to Banglapedia, the fortified city, enclosed by ramparts averaging about six metres high with a deep moat on three sides, was probably founded under the Mauryas; Alexander Cunningham identified the ruins as Pundranagara in 1879. Through the Gupta and Pala periods it was a flourishing provincial capital, and excavations have revealed eighteen building levels of continuous habitation. The town that today hosts the Station Road fruit quarter thus sits beside one of the oldest urban centres of the subcontinent.

Bogura district, in Rajshahi Division, covers 2,898.68 sq km and had a population of about 3.4 million at the 2011 census, making it one of the more densely settled districts of the country. It has 12 upazilas and 11 municipalities; Bogra Sadar, the upazila containing the town, was the most populous, with about 555,014 people. The district was established in 1821 and divided into Bogra and Joypurhat in 1983. It is also densely peopled, with about 1,173 persons per sq km across the district and over 3,100 in Bogra Sadar, the town's own upazila, which is part of why congestion on a central road draws such complaint.

Agriculture dominates the district's economy. Banglapedia gives agriculture as the source of income for 57.32 percent of the population, far ahead of commerce at 13.63 percent and service at 7.66 percent. Fields of paddy, vegetables and fruit across the twelve upazilas feed markets like the one on Station Road, where produce is gathered for sale on to retailers and to buyers from beyond the district. A wholesale fruit market in such a town is a hinge between the orchards of the region and the consumers of the town and beyond, which is why its location, and the traffic it draws, matter so much to residents.

The district's reach helps explain the traffic. Bogura is watered by the Karatoya, Jamuna, Nagar, Bangali and Ichamati rivers and dotted with beels, and its twelve upazilas, Adamdighi, Kahaloo, Gabtali, Dhupchanchia, Dhunat, Nandigram, Bogra Sadar, Shahjahanpur, Shibganj, Sherpur, Sariakandi and Sonatala, send produce toward the sadar town. With literacy at about 49.4 percent at the 2011 census and most households depending on farming, the town's wholesale markets are where a large rural economy meets its buyers, so a change in where the fruit trade sits is felt well beyond a single road.

The depots at the centre of the dispute are arats, the wholesale establishments that are the backbone of Bangladesh's fruit and produce trade. An arat is run by an aratdar, who receives consignments from growers and traders and sells them on in bulk to retailers, usually against a commission, and often handles the money and the accounts for the day's trade. Trucks arrive loaded with fruit, porters move the boxes, and buyers settle their bills before taking the produce away. It is this concentration of trucks, porters, cash and buyers in one place that makes an arat efficient, and also what makes it hard to move: traders fear that the buyers who come to a long-established quarter will not follow it to a new site.

Timing sharpened the problem in July 2023. In Bangladesh the months of Baishakh, Jaistha and Ashar, roughly May to July, are the height of the fruit season, when most of the major fruits ripen together. According to Banglapedia, about 54 percent of the country's fruit is harvested in the four months from Baishakh to Srabon. Mango is harvested from June to August, jackfruit from June to September, litchi in June and July, and guava from July to September. A wholesale fruit market is therefore at its busiest, and its trucks and crowds at their heaviest, exactly in the season in which the dispute played out.

Not all fruit is seasonal. Banana, papaya, coconut and sapodilla are available through the year, which is why the government's target was framed as year-round availability rather than higher peak output alone. But the summer peak remains overwhelming: the months the harvest clusters in are known as the Modhu Mash, the honey month, when mango, jackfruit, litchi and pineapple ripen together. For a town's wholesale market, that means the trade swells from a steady year-round base to a summer flood of trucks and crates, concentrating exactly the load that the Tinmatha move was meant to shift out of the centre.

The fruit passing through markets like Bogura's is part of a trade that had grown strongly in the years before 2023. The Department of Agricultural Extension (DAE) and figures reported by The Daily Star in 2019 showed fruit cultivation rising from about 4.74 lakh hectares, yielding 87.86 lakh tonnes, in 2006-07 to around 7.24 lakh hectares and an output of 1.21 crore tonnes by 2017-18. The number of fruit varieties grown commercially rose from 56 about a decade earlier to 72. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) was cited as estimating that fruit production had grown by an average of about 11.5 percent a year over 18 years, among the highest rates in the world.

The same FAO rankings placed Bangladesh among the leading fruit producers: second in the world for jackfruit, which is the national fruit and can weigh up to 50 kg; seventh for mango, grown in some 3,000 varieties with the best known in the northern districts; and eighth for guava. Even so, per capita fruit intake was put at about 80 grams a day, well below the 250 grams recommended, and the government had set a goal of year-round fruit availability by 2030, pursued through a Year-Round Fruit Production project begun in 2014-15. Against that background, a purpose-built wholesale fruit market standing empty while the trade clogged a town-centre road was the kind of local problem the dispute at Bogura had come to represent.

The growth was not even across fruits. Guava is a striking case: according to the same 2019 account, output rose from about 9,000 tonnes in 1980-81 to 506,478 tonnes in 2017-18, a roughly 56-fold increase over 37 years, helped by the spread of high-yielding Thai guava from about 2005-06. Overall fruit output was reported to have risen by about 33.26 lakh tonnes over eleven years. Guava is grown mainly in the Chittagong, Comilla, Sylhet and Barisal areas, while the best litchi comes from the Dinajpur, Rajshahi, Jessore and Khulna regions, the northern and western belts that also supply much of the fruit sold through northern towns like Bogura.

Behind these numbers lay a deliberate push. The Department of Agricultural Extension's Year-Round Fruit Production project, begun in 2014-15, promoted off-season and new varieties so that orchards would bear across more of the calendar; the rise from 56 to 72 commercially grown varieties reflected that spread. More fruit from more varieties over more of the year meant more produce moving through wholesale depots, and more pressure on the roads around them, which is the practical backdrop to Bogura's search for a workable market site.

The range of fruit on offer was also widening. The country still imported apples, mandarins, oranges, pears and grapes, with such imports running at about 2.82 lakh tonnes in the first eight months of 2017-18 before easing to 2.52 lakh tonnes in the same period of 2018-19 as home-grown fruit filled more of the market. Older figures compiled in Banglapedia give a sense of the scale of the main crops: around 2007, banana covered some 54,000 hectares and yielded about 899,000 tonnes, mango about 25,000 hectares and 662,000 tonnes, jackfruit about 7,000 hectares and 174,000 tonnes, and guava about 6,000 hectares and 149,000 tonnes, with the seven major fruits, mango, banana, jackfruit, pineapple, papaya, litchi and jujube, together accounting for about 79 percent of a total fruit area of some 139,535 hectares.

Photo: Hasan Iqbal / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

Sources: Jagonews24, Banglapedia, The Daily Star, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).