Thousands of people in Panchagarh, the northernmost district in Bangladesh, earn their living by quarrying stones from the Mahananda and Karotoa rivers, which flow down from the Himalayas.
Officials concerned in Panchagarh district said over 50,000 thousand people are engaged in the process of stone quarrying from the Mahananda and Karotoa rivers.
According to locals, workers at first pick up stones with sands from the rivers. Then they separate the stones from sand and later they pile stones on the banks of the river. They have to work almost every day from dawn to dusk .
During a visit to Panchagarh, it was seen that thousands of people remain busy inside the rivers quarrying stones with long iron rod or bamboo sticks in their hands. After pulling over the sand-mixed stones from under the water, they preserve them inside baskets made of tubes of various motor vehicles. They use tubes as baskets so that these could remain floating on the water.
Since there is not much opportunity for forming agriculture in this area, Panchagarh, they have been making a living by extracting stones from this river since independence.
Mohammad Ali, a stone worker, said that their ancestors earned a living by extracting stones from the river Mahananda. They also follow the ancestral profession.
Another worker Hasan Ali said due to flooding of the river in the rainy season, the extraction of stones from the river stops for a loan season of two months when they suffer from financial crisis. He added that their children also work as stone masons while they continue their studies.
According to them, each of the workers could extract 10 to 15 CFTs of stones a day and each CFT of stones is sold at Tk 60.
They, however, said a number of workers have been killed in BSF firing in the recent past while they crossed boarders for extracting stones from the Mahananda river.
After working hard from dawn to dusk, each of them extracts only 10 to 15 CFTs of stone. The traders buy a CFT of stone from the workers at the rate of Tk 28 to 32 and process them and supply them to different parts of the country.
Talking to Bangladesh Post, Mohammad Yusuf Ali, Superintendent of Police (SP) of Panchagarh, said thousands of people are engaged in the extraction of stones every day from the Mahananda and Karotoa rivers.
The Panchagarh SP said, “There is no bars for the people, who are poor and day labourers, in the extraction of stones from the rivers. But, we do not allow any businessman in the extraction of stones from the rivers.”
“We also do not allow any machine in the stone extraction”, SP Mohammad Yusuf Ali said and continued as saying that machines are not allowed in stone extraction considering the environment issue.
The river Mahananda has entered the Banglabandha area of Tentulia in Panchagarh from Phulbari area of India along the Bangladesh-India border. After crossing a distance of about 24 kilometres, the river came to the Puranbazar area of Tentulia and re-entered the interior of India.
Accordingly, Karatoa is also one of the rivers bordering Bangladesh and India. It flows through Jalpaiguri in West Bengal and the northwestern part of Bangladesh, Panchagarh and Dinajpur districts.
