Ten kilometres inside the Madhupur forest in Tangail, Pranjal Nokrek works for an American company from under a lychee tree. Not for the shade. The mud-walled houses of Gachhabari village get no mobile signal indoors, so the only place his connection holds is the open ground beneath the tree. In neighbouring Gaira and Idilpur, freelancers tie modems to branches and rooftops to catch whatever 2G or 3G reaches them, and walk into the forest at night to find a spot with enough signal to upload a finished file to a client abroad.
An institute in a courtyard
The reason there are freelancers here at all is Subir Nokrek, a young Garo man who learned the trade in 2017, earned $75 on his first job and, when the work outgrew him, started training others from his courtyard. His Nokrek IT Institute has since taught more than 5,000 people and opened branches in Dhaka, Mymensingh, Gazipur and Jamalpur. Around 350 young people from the forest villages now do design, digital marketing and data work for overseas clients.
Dina Mree from Idilpur, who learned digital marketing at the institute, earns about Tk 2.5 lakh a month. During the 2020 lockdown she worked from the village for three months with a router hanging from the mango tree in her yard; she now lives in Mymensingh town for the connection. "Our interest is enormous, our opportunity is small," said Philip Mree, a teacher at Gaira's Musleh Uddin Chowdhury High School, who cannot leave because of his classes. "Just as we sit down to work, the internet stalls and the work stops."
The numbers behind the frustration
- Mobile data from Grameenphone and Banglalink: outdoors only, 2G to 3G speeds.
- Local broadband: advertised at 10-20 Mbps by the provider in Jalchhatra, delivered at 2-3 Mbps according to users, and only when the power is on.
- Villages affected: more than twenty, from Gaira and Kakraguni to Pirgachha and Thanarbaid.
Why this story mattered
Bangladesh talks a great deal about "Digital Bangladesh" and about freelancers as an export industry. Madhupur is the test of both. The skills are here, the clients are here, the dollars are here; the only thing missing is a tower and a fibre line. Prothom Alo's reporting on the village in February 2022 was read by the right people.
Update: within two weeks Grameenphone put up a temporary 4G tower in Gaira, and on 12 March the villages celebrated with a festival; a permanent site awaits Forest Department permission. In April the government gave laptops to the Madhupur freelancers.
