Date palm sap collection has begun in Dinajpur as winter arrives. Tappers, known as gachhis, are busy collecting sap and making molasses in all 13 upazilas of the district, including Nawabganj and Phulbari. They have little work for most of the year, and these winter months are their main season.
Before sunrise on foggy mornings the tappers lower the clay pots that hang full of sap from rows of date palms along the roads. The sap is boiled in large tin pans over big earthen stoves to make gur (molasses), patali cakes and runny lali, and the new molasses goes straight to market.
In the Daudpur area of Nawabganj, six tappers from Bagmara upazila in Rajshahi district are making molasses. One of them, Hazrat Ali, said they have come here every winter for five years and take the trees on contract from local owners. This season they collect sap every morning from 232 date palms.
Another member of the team, Zakir Hossain, 42, from Manoharpur village in Bagmara, said they spend four to five months a year working in different districts and do other work at home the rest of the time. Each tree gives two to two and a half kilos of sap a day at first, rising later to three or four kilos.
He set out the numbers: early in the season the team makes an estimated 25 to 30 kilos of molasses a day, rising later to one or two maunds. A kilo of date molasses sells to wholesalers at 235 taka and at retail for 250 taka.
Nawabganj upazila nirbahi officer Bidhan Kanti Haldar said he had inspected the tappers' work and told them to make the molasses hygienically, which, he said, they are doing.
Reported by Faruk Hossain in Dinajpur for Dhaka Tribune Bangla.
Photo: Azaman666 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Source: Dhaka Tribune
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