In the ongoing situation including curfew, there is a standstill in the Akhaura land port of Brahmanbaria, one of the most export-oriented of the country. Due to the disruption of export operations, exports of goods to India through these ports have fallen by more than half. This has reduced the export earnings to a great extent.
The yard of this land port, which used to be busy with cargo trucks and pickups, is now silent. This export-oriented port has come to a standstill due to the situation surrounding the quota movement. Outage in internet service and effect of curfew across the country caused deadlock in the export trade of one of the largest ports of the country. During normal times, at least 15 to 20 types of goods including frozen fish, rods, cement, plastic, furniture worth about 2 lakh dollars are exported to India through this port.
However, due to curfew and ongoing unrest across the country, nothing could be exported except for nominal fish and cement in the last 5 days. Besides, only 53 tons of fish and 70 tons of cement were exported by manually recording the bill of export information from July 20 to July 24 due to lack of online system due to internet outage. Export income from these is about Tk 1 crore 65 lakh.
Several businessmen of the port said that we could not export many products due to the deadlock of several days. A handful of fish-carrying pickups are coming. They have been exported. Goods cannot come from far away. As a result, apart from financial losses, the government is also losing revenue.
Hasibul Hasan, President of C&F Association of Akhaura Land Port, said that no other goods except fish are being exported as the goods cannot reach the port from far away. In this, all traders including exporters are facing losses. We are hoping for an improvement in the overall situation including speedy normalization of fully normal internet services for the sake of traders. Then the export activities will be strengthened again.
In this regard, Md. Imran Hossain, Assistant Commissioner (Revenue) of Akhaura Land Port Customs Station, said that there is no restriction on the export of goods when they reach the port. Goods arriving at the port have been exported to India through manual billing system during internet outage.
He said that last Wednesday (July 24) only fish was exported through Akhaura land port. Earlier some cement was also exported to India. Fish and steel pipes were exported today (Thursday). Hopefully the situation will normalize and the port will return to its previous form.
It should be noted that the first import-export trade of goods started in 1994 through Akhaura land port. Akhaura land port was established as a full-fledged port in 2010 considering the increasing importance of trade. Since then various products including frozen fish, rods, cement, plastic, edible oil, cotton, furniture and food items are exported to the Indian state of Tripura through the port. From there the export products are supplied to different states of India.
ZH
