There is a festive atmosphere in the Mongalbaria village under the Pakundia upazila in Kishoreganj as villagers are busy collecting and selling their special variety of litchis which is popularly known as the Mongalbaria litchi.
The litchi is popular for its mouth-watering taste, special red colour, big size, and thick pulp with small seed inside it. Mongalbaria litchis attract traders from different places, including Dhaka, Chittagong, Rajshahi and Sylhet.
People also send litchis to relatives who live abroad so that they do not miss out on the opportunity to have the juicy fruit.
The profitable fruit has brought a change in the densely populated village which is 20 km away from Kishoreganj town.
There are around 20,000 litchi trees in the village, said locals, Samsudduha and Abdul Hakim.
Ruhul Amin, a resident of the village, said there are some 1,500 small litchi gardens in the village and most of them are in courtyards, on the banks of ponds and on roadsides.
Towhid Mia introduced litchi cultivation to the locality some 30 years back when he planted litchi trees in his orchard and earned a huge profit from it.
Inspired by his success, many people became interested in planting litchi trees. Mukhlesur Rahman, a farmer, earns about Tk1.50 lakh a year from his 25 small trees.
Abdul Malek Bepari earned about Tk25,000 from one big tree this year while Nasir Uddin earned about Tk6 lakh from his 105 small trees and Ruhul Amin earned Tk3 lakh from his 45 trees.
This year, they are selling at Tk350-450 per hundred litchis to traders.
“We deserve a higher price, but we cannot sell the fruit on our own because of poor transportation facilities,” said Nurul Islam.
The litchi growers of Mongalbaria have sought help from the authorities for building easy transport and marketing systems so that they can get fair prices.
Tanvir Haider, who buys litchis amounting Tk20,000-25,000 every year to distribute among his relatives, said hundreds of people have achieved self-subsistence because of the litchi cultivation in the village.
Rajan Sarker, a social worker in the upazila, said litchi farming has been expanding on a commercial basis and is earning fortunes for hundreds of enthusiastic farmers of this area and the commercial scale of litchi has brought about a silent economic revolution in the locality.
Growers have been collecting litchis and selling them for the last four days and it will continue for 20 more days, said Md Ashrafuzzaman, a litchi grower.
He also expressed hope that he will be able to earn Tk5 lakh from selling his litchi.
“We usually advise litchi growers on how to protect trees from pests and how to use fertiliser,” said Md Liakat Hossain Khan, agriculture officer of the Pakundia upazila.
