Economy
The area around Sylhet is a traditional tea growing area. The Surma Valley is covered with terraces of tea gardens and lush green tropical forests. Srimangal is known as the tea capital of Bangladesh and for miles around one can see the tea gardens on the hill slopes.
The area has over 150 tea gardens, including three of the largest tea gardens in the world both in terms of area and production. Nearly 300,000 workers, of which over 75% are women, are employed on the tea estates. Employers prefer to engage women for plucking tea leaves since they do a better job and are paid less than the men. Unfortunately recent drought has killed nearly a tenth of the tea shrubs.
The gardens are relics from the days of the British Raj. The plantations were started by the British and the managers still live in white timber homes as they did in those days. The bungalows stand on huge lawns and the service and lifestyle is pretty much unchanged.
A relatively new area that has come under tea cultivation is the sub-Himalayan terrain of Panchagarh. The soil and climate is highly favorable for growing tea here. In fact this area is contiguous with Assam and Bengal in India, where tea has been grown for decades. Beginning with only 300 acres (1.2 km2) of land in 2000, the cash crop is now being cultivated on over 3,500 acres (14 km2) in Tentulia, Sadar and Atoari upazilas of Panchagarh.
The humus content in the soil here is more than in the traditional tea-growing areas of Sylhet. The tea produced in Panchagarh is supposedly much better in quality than that of Sylhet. Several nurseries have been set up in Panchagarh and Thakurgaon to supply saplings to the tea gardens. Bangladesh exports tea to Pakistan and Russia.
There are large numbers of investments and businesses in the city and in large towns funded by Sylhetis living abroad, in particular by British Bangladeshis, over 95 percent of whom come from this Sylhet region. The Bangladesh government has set up a special Export Processing Zone (EPZ) in Sylhet, in order to attract foreign investors, mainly from the UK.
Read more about this topic: Sylhet Division
Famous quotes containing the word economy:
“It enhances our sense of the grand security and serenity of nature to observe the still undisturbed economy and content of the fishes of this century, their happiness a regular fruit of the summer.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Quidquid luce fuit tenebris agit: but also the other way around. What we experience in dreams, so long as we experience it frequently, is in the end just as much a part of the total economy of our soul as anything we “really” experience: because of it we are richer or poorer, are sensitive to one need more or less, and are eventually guided a little by our dream-habits in broad daylight and even in the most cheerful moments occupying our waking spirit.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“I favor the policy of economy, not because I wish to save money, but because I wish to save people. The men and women of this country who toil are the ones who bear the cost of the Government. Every dollar that we carelessly waste means that their life will be so much the more meager. Every dollar that we prudently save means that their life will be so much the more abundant. Economy is idealism in its most practical terms.”
—Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933)