Home ›› 30 Jul 2021 ›› Nation
Nitaiganj Wholesale Market – one of the oldest trading hubs of essential commodities in the country — has continued to be a boon for Narayanganj for years, having a daily transaction of Tk 250 crores.
The market is not only adding a wholesome amount of revenue to the country’s economy every year, it is also creating employment opportunities for thousands of Narayanganj’s residents and contributing to the GDP (gross domestic product).
The saga of Narayanganj’s Nitaiganj Wholesale Market began some 200 years back with the arrival of Portuguese and English traders in the country in the first half of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The west bank of the Shitalakshya River in Nitaiganj was an important centre for trade and commerce in this region until the reign of Mir Jumla, the Mughal governor of Bengal (1660-1663). Nitaiganj-centric trade and commerce in Narayanganj flourished in the latter decades competing with other prominent wholesale markets such as Moulvibazar in Dhaka and Khatunganj in Chattogram. Merchants from home and abroad used to bring consumer goods on giant boats and sell them on the banks of the Shitalakshya river at Nitaiganj. In the beginning, there used to be a weekly market, better known as haat.
Gradually the haat began to operate twice a week, becoming a large commercial centre. Nitaiganj remains the centre of the country’s trade and commerce activities to date, emerging to be the most prominent and active wholesale marketplace in the country.
Its unique location on the Shitalakshya River connected it to the major waterways of Padma, Meghna, Brahmaputra, Dhaleshwari and Buriganga and through them to Jamuna. For ease of transportation, markets in a majority of districts trade with it.
According to the local traders, Nitaiganj produces and supplies wholesale consumer goods such as flour, pulses, oil, sugar, salt, animal feed to at least 40 districts of the country, including Barishal, Sylhet, Faridpur, Chandpur and Cumilla.
There are 72 flour mills, 100 rice warehouses, 50 wheat warehouses, 100 pulse warehouses, 50 salt warehouses, about 400 oil and sugar warehouses, eight flour warehouses and thousands of husk goods (cow feed) warehouses in Nitaiganj. The various consumer goods produced by these factories cater to the needs of the people of different districts of the country. The importance of the products produced in Nitaiganj is immense to meet the daily consumption needs of a large population of the country.
“We used to sell goods worth Tk 500 crore a day in the past. Activities in the market used to begin at 7:00am and continued to 10:00pm,” said Abdul Mannan, owner of Padma Flour Mill.
“However, with the rapid industrialisation in the area, some big companies such as City Group, ACI Group and TK Group are producing much more products efficiently than the independent factories in Nitaiganj market and delivering those to different districts swiftly through their well-established transportation system,” added Mannan.
He further said that the main reason behind the downturn of the Nitaiganj Wholesale Market is that the big corporate companies are able to import, produce, and deliver goods in a bulk amount and thus make more profit. In comparison, the Nitaiganj market has fallen behind in adopting new technologies in their operation with less productivity.
Another reason is its poor infrastructure and transport facilities. The whole area is full of unplanned infrastructures and poorly structured connecting roads, highways, which makes it difficult for the businesses to deliver their goods to other areas.
However, the traders and factory owners of the market think that there is still hope for Nitaiganj; firstly for the fact that it has a well established loyal customer base.
Secondly, traders can buy goods and products on credit the whole year and return their debt on the first day of Bengali New Year (Pahela Baishakh), which the big companies do not offer to their customers.
