Underweight urea sacks sent to dealers

The Bangladesh Chemical Industries Corporation (BCIC) has started sending dealers fertiliser sacks weighing a lot less than the usual 50kg, instead of storing them in state-owned warehouses.

The state-run organisation has imported from Saudi Arabia 15,750 tonnes of urea in 3.15 lakh sacks, which are supposed to weigh 50kg each.

Each tonne of fertiliser had cost Tk 39,000.

While unloading the fertiliser from the mother vessel at Mongla Port on October 8, operators of local lighter vessels found that many sacks weighed less than 50kg. There were some sacks that weighed between 42 and 43kg, according to logs of a lighter vessel.

 The Daily Star has obtained copies of the logs.

Of the 15,750 tonnes of urea, 3,500 tonnes were supposed to be kept at a state-owned warehouse in Khulna's Shiromoni while the rest were supposed to be stored at the state-owned warehouses in Jessore, Jhenidah, Barisal, Patuakhali, Bhola and Mymensingh.

The Khulna warehouse refused to store fertiliser sacks that weighed less than 50kg.

“I've weighed 680 sacks and found 50 sacks weighing less than 50kg. I didn't receive them,” the warehouse in-charge Jahangir Alam told The Daily Star on Tuesday.

However, upon directives from the BCIC higher authorities, he allowed the carriers to store the sacks at the warehouse with signatures and the condition that they would take them back,” he said.

“I won't deliver this [fertiliser sack weighing less] to our farmers even if I lose my job,” he said.

After the Khulna incident, the BCIC's Dhaka office, in an attempt to cover up the incident, asked the in-charges of the warehouses to deliver the fertiliser to dealers directly instead of storing them, according to sources in the BCIC.

The sources said farmers would suffer as they would get less fertiliser for their money.

BCIC officials in Dhaka and the districts where the fertiliser were supposed to be kept fear that the organisation might incur a loss of Tk 3 crore due to this.

The lighter vessel's logs, however, showed a few of the sacks were overweight. Unloading of the fertiliser from the mother vessel at the port was going on.

Shahadat Hossain, operator of one of the lighter vessels unloading fertiliser at the port, said, “We informed the BCIC authorities immediately after we had found the mismatch in the fertiliser sacks. We also refused to carry those.”

Contacted, BCIC Chairman Mohammad Iqbal said, “We have informed the Saudi supplier about the mismatch in weight. They admitted that due to technical errors in their system it might cause this untoward thing.

“They've promised us to compensate. We are in contact with them,” he told The Daily Star.