Female farm labourers of Barind region discriminated over wages

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Our Correspondent | Published: February 08, 2015 00:00:00 | Updated: November 30, 2026 06:01:00

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RAJSHAHI, Feb 7: For hundreds of years, female farm labourers of Barind region are being discriminated over payment of their salaries. Still, a huge number of female farm labourers remained unemployed during the off-season of farming. Though underpaid and discriminated, those female farm-labourers used to work more with efficiency than those of their male counterparts.
It is learnt, each male farm labourer used to get Tk 200 for a day while a female labourer earns only Tk 150 even after working for same time.
Female labourers, mainly from aboriginal communities, are seen to work as farmhands in agricultural farms like in automatic rice mills, rice-drying fields, crop-fields and in various government projects. In recent years, Muslim and Hindu women are also joining with the aboriginal women as farm workforce.
On the other hand, most of the female aboriginal farm hands being engaged in works from their early adulthood, are being deprived of their education. As a result, to thousands of aboriginal female labourers, education was just a sort of luxury because they have to spend most of their day time in search of job or in working as day labourers to manage a handful of morsel.
 Moreover, most of the poor aboriginal women of Barind region of Tanore, Godagari, Manda, Nachole and Nimatpur upazilas have been trapped by the loan of NGOs. As a result, often they have to work in the fields to repay instalments of their loans.
Golapi Marandi)(22),a female Adibashi farm labourer of Kaliganj village under Tanore upazila informed, she has to work in the field to maintain her family and to repay instalment of loan from NGO.
Hamanati Rani(53) a widow of village Saronjoy under Tanore informed, she used to work under '40-day' government programme as a labourer. But, after the end of the programme, she remained unemployed and used to work as farmhand in others' field. She lamented that though government pays 'widowed allowance' and 'elderly people allowance', she gets none of those. She further said, though female labourers works equal as male labourers, females are paid less than those of males. She demanded same wages for male and female labourers.
Shimul Billa Sultana, Women Affairs Officer of Godagari upazila informed, though a large number of females of rural areas are now coming out of their houses to join as workforce in agricultural farms but they are being discriminated in case of wages. Such discrimination must be stopped, she said.
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