BSCIC firms lament absence of direct road connectivity

Annually churning out some Tk 65 crore worth of products, businesses at the industrial estate of the Bangladesh Small and Cottage Industries Corporation (BSCIC) in Pirojpur are incurring extra expenses for the lack of direct road connectivity.

Products currently have to be transported around a kilometre on engine-run vessels over the Boya canal and then across the Sandhya river to a terminal where road transportation can be availed to the surrounding districts.

This also makes it difficult to avail a ferry service some distance away at Kourikhara village.

This could have been avoided had a nearby bridge over the Boya canal been rebuilt. At present, the old and narrow bridge can only support, at best, the weight of goods-laden rickshaw vans.

The estate, established in the 60s on around 24.7 acres of land at Nesarabad upazila, also needs its road network to be repaved.

There are currently 91 companies running operations on taking allotment of 166 of the 169 plots there.

Another 11 companies are due to launch operations while four have suspended production.

Due to the availability of logs at wholesale in a nearby floating market, most products at the estate are made out of wood. This includes furniture, cricket stumps and carrom boards. The firms also produce rope, quilt and shopping bags and process plastic for recycling.

"Only because of having no direct road communication, we fail to draw the attention of wholesale buyers from distant areas like Dhaka and Chattogram in spite of producing good products," said Mehedi Hasan Imran, a furniture factory owner.

The transportation cost is two to three times higher than what it would have been solely over roads, said another businessperson, Mohammad Masum.

Costs can be reduced if the bridge over the Boya canal is replaced with a wider concrete bridge and the roads are widened, he said. The issue was acknowledged by Milton Chandra Bairagi, deputy manager of the estate.

"Though the bridge is there, businesses cannot use it as it is very narrow and old," he said.

Bairagi, however, claimed that they were trying to develop the estate through the construction of a jetty in the Boya canal.