Over the past decade, tea drinking among rural Bengalis has risen enormously. Village men and women aged 15 to 80 drink anywhere from 2 to 20 cups a day, worth a huge sum each year. Yet this vast financial turnover stays completely out of sight. Channel i will from now on regularly show such hidden economic activities.

Tea when getting up and sitting down, tea for hospitality, tea in thirst or in distaste. Tea as an addiction, tea for the taste or even without it. Life in rural Bengal seems impossible without tea. The day begins with tea on the lips and ends with the last sip. So how many cups does a village person drink a day?

A middle-aged man in the Gabkhan bridge area of Jhalakathi joked, "What else would I do? I drink these cups of tea and think things through." Asked how many cups he drinks, an elderly man said, "I drink it even at eleven at night. One tea after another; I can do without rice, but not tea."

When the same question was put to ten or twelve more people, they were found to be in the habit of drinking between two and ten cups a day.

In this developing country of 16 crore people, the daily tea bill of people at the grassroots says a lot. If one person drinks two cups on average, and 4 crore of the 16 crore people drink tea, that is 8 crore cups; at an average of Tk 5 a cup, that is Tk 40 crore spent on tea alone.

In the Gabkhan bridge area, people were found to drink five cups on average. That would mean the people of Bangladesh spend almost Tk 100 crore on tea every day. On top of that come the cities and the nationwide sales of packaged leaf, dust and tea bags.

Where money changes hands, there is an economy. If tea comes to Tk 100 crore a day, it amounts to Tk 36,500 crore a year, more than the cost of building the Padma bridge. The same sums could be done for betel leaf, bidi and cigarettes, puri and singara, or bread and bananas.

This huge sum stays hidden from the accounts. Cup after cup is not just tea drinking; it reflects the changing daily lives of grassroots people. This could be linked to our mainstream economy, and through it the picture of a changing Bangladesh's progress could emerge.

Source: Shykh Seraj. First published in Bengali on The Agro News.