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A year to forget
Turaj Ahmad visits Tangail and Sirajganj and discovers the plight of handloom weavers, one of the worst-effected people in this year’s floods and finds out what the government can still do to salvage, in the least, a part of their livelihood
photo by Al-Emrun Garjon
The dawn of each new day for the past few weeks, has presented itself with a feeling of anticipation as much as it has of anxiety for Mohammad Yamen, a handloom weaver, as a result of a seemingly irrepressible force of nature – flood. Anticipation, due to the fact that the water is bound to recede completely at some point and thus allow him to restore some parity in his household. On the other hand, anxiety, due to the unknown extent of the challenges which lie ahead of him if he is to do so having lost his livelihood.
‘I used to earn around Taka 800 – 900 per week from my work. But for the last few weeks, I had been sitting at home, unemployed, running the family on the basis of the money I loaned,’ says Yamen, a resident of Balla in the Kalihati upazila of Tangail.
Amidst the crisis though, he was also met with the birth of his first child, which was a moment to savour for his family and himself. However, this also meant that Yamen’s need to restore his livelihood significantly increased, now faced with the responsibility of providing for eight members of his family.
‘The extent of the flood’s impact upon my family has been such that not only have our machineries been damaged, we even had to move our livestock inside our own house,’ Yamen exclaims. ‘My family and I work with five handlooms that are stored in a small workshop near our house. The workshop was completely inaccessible in the past few weeks as it was surrounded by water on all fronts,’ he says.
Fortunately, the flood water in his area has started receding, enabling Yamen to redeem some of the essential tools that are used by his family. ‘Now I have to work harder than ever to clear off my debts and looking at the state of my looms – which requires a lot of repair work– there is still a long way to go before we can start leading our usual lives,’ explains Yamen.
According to Assaduzzaman, field supervisor of the Handloom Board Basic Centre in Kalihati, weavers all across the district are facing similar circumstances. In Kalihati 3,364 families of weavers out of the 5,620 have been badly affected by the flood with 13,439 handlooms completely damaged, according to the Basic Centre in Kalihati
‘The loss from the damage of assets and machineries would equate to somewhere in the region of Taka six lakhs,’ says Assaduzzaman.
‘In the entire Tangail district, there are approximately one and a half lakh weavers out of which one lakh has been affected by this recent series of floods. Another 12 thousand handlooms have also been damaged with an estimated damage worth eight crores,’ says Samidul Haque, liaison officer, handloom board basic centre under the Tangail sadar thana.
Meanwhile, a similar fate has engulfed many weavers in other parts of the country as a result of the recent inundations, with Sirajganj the most affected of them.
In order to tackle these torrid times, Bablu Mia, a resident of Tamai village of the Belkuchi upazila in Sirajganj, borrowed a sum of Tk 2,000 from a local moneylender, hoping to provide for his large family. However, even before the month ended, he was forced to borrow another Tk 1000 with an interest of Tk 200 per month, which now makes his case even more difficult especially with the uncertainties he faces over the future of his trade.
Weavers express fear over their survival having no specialisation in any other skill other than weaving. Left with no money of their own, a lot of them have borrowed money committing monthly interest to the lenders in order to make ends meet at their crisis period.
Even though the handloom factory owners are trying their level best to lend a helping hand out on to their employees, they themselves are at loss, having lost hefty sums of money with the flood’s affects on their factories.
Handloom factory owners urge the government to sanction interest-free loans to rehabilitate them which otherwise may take a heavy toll on the owners if borrowed with interest. The market during Eid is the most profitable time of the year for weavers, and this time, the flood coinciding with it, has completely ruined the ‘peak’ season for them.
While many weavers are desperately trying to revive their fortunes, in their ancestral profession, despite the hefty damage, many others have unfortunately looked elsewhere to secure a form of livelihood.
‘Flood-hit weavers have struggled to increase their productivity with factories becoming inaccessible, and as a result had a poor income. This has forced many workers already struggling to pay off their debts to look elsewhere for a living,’ says Jinnat, member of the Bolla Union, representing weavers in the Kalihati upazila.
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Weavers taking up other professions to provide for their families are not necessarily because of the floods that have taken place this year, according to Samidul Haque. ‘We have observed that this trend has been becoming more frequent over the years and not just because of the current flood situation,’ he says.
‘Up to three members of a family usually work on a single handloom. Although our statistics show that the amount a family of weavers earn have increased over the years, the decreasing number of handlooms in use point to the fact that the art of handicraft in our region is slowly fading out,’ he adds.
This is also largely due to the rise in the prices of the materials that are required to produce clothes such as saris and lungis according to weavers of Tangail.
‘The price of yarn has increased to Taka 1800 per bundle from Taka 1700 from last week, although the market price of our products has remained the same,’ says Motiar Rahman, weaver’s president of ward number one in the Bolla union.
‘With the bulk of profit from sales retained by the merchants and the price of raw materials for weavers decided by them as well, it becomes difficult to satisfy the workers on wages,’ says Mohammad Tofazzal Hossain, a resident of Rampur in the Kalihati, who had to shut down five of his handlooms due to the instabilities in the prices of raw materials.
‘In order to solve some of these problems, the government could take a number of steps,’ says Samidul Haque.
‘Firstly, the market should be controlled so that the supply of the raw materials meets the demands of the weavers. For instance, the yarn that is used by the weavers has to come all the way from Narayanganj and if in some way it could be brought from somewhere closer, transportation cost would also come down. Weavers can then expect a better profit,’ he explains.
‘The government could even subsidise our handloom weavers the way jamdani, for example, receives a 15 per cent subsidy, which will decrease the cost of the production of each unit of saris,’ he adds
For time immemorial, the tic-toeing sound made by handlooms has been a source of reverence for the inhabitants of areas such as Tangail and Sirajganj. However, if the statistics that have been gathered by local authorities over the years are anything to go by, the demise of the art of hand-weaving is imminent.
Eid is usually considered to be the most profitable time of the year for weavers. This time around, with Eid almost coinciding with their rehabilitation from the floods, its significance has been raised substantially.
Thus, a number of weavers have urged the government and other buyers to buy their products directly from their bazaars this time around rather than from the trade merchants in the hope of salvaging something out of what might be considered a year to forget for them.
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