Village Market

A village market is an important temporary [সাময়িক] centre for buying and seeing goods to fulfil the need of the villagers. It generally sits at the junction [সংযোগ] of roads, under a big banyan tree or the bank of a canal or a river in almost every village of Bangladesh. Villagers sell and buy their daily necessaries. There are two kinds of markets – daily markets and ‘hats’. Daily markets open in the morning and break up at 2 p.m. generally ‘hats’ sit twice in a week. It has mainly two parts – permanent shops and temporary shops. In the permanent shop’s people buy clothes, medicine, paper, rice etc. From the temporary shops, people buy vegetables, milk, and fish. The fish market is the most crowded of all. The betel-leaf seller sits in a corner under the shed. A village market is a part and parcel of our rural economy and it does a great service to the rural people. They meet their friends and relatives there and discuss village politics and settle disputes [বিবাদ]. The village postman finds it a unique [অনন্য] place to deliver letters, money orders etc. A village market is not also free from defects. Markets are dusty, nasty and unsanitary [অনিরাপদ]. It is a noisy and an unhealthy place. There is no fixed price in the market. A customer may be cheated at any time. Pick-pockets and gamblers [জুয়ারি] come up and do their evils. Sometimes, the shopkeepers are also oppressed [নিপীড়িত] by the local criminals. Besides sometimes haggling [দরাদরি] leads to quarrel. We should keep it neat and clean. As it is the backbone of the rural economy, our government should take proper steps against price-hiking, pickpockets, gamblers and other criminals.