Ten years ago Nokrek IT Institute was a courtyard. Subir Nokrek, a young Garo man from the Madhupur forest in Tangail, had taught himself freelancing, earned $75 on his first job, and found more work than one person could do, so he began training the neighbours' children under the trees. On Friday, 18 September 2026, the institute he built marked its tenth anniversary with a day-long celebration on the grounds of Notre Dame College, Mymensingh: an inter-department football tournament, a cultural programme, and awards for the freelancers and entrepreneurs it produced. By its own count it has now trained about a lakh young people in outsourcing, through branches and district seminars across the country.
The day
Father Thaddeus Hembrom, principal of Notre Dame College Mymensingh, opened the football; Aranya Chiran, chairman of the Tribal Welfare Association, the novelist Rahitul Islam, Prothom Alo's operations manager Shyamal Sarkar, Father Mrinal Mrong and Subir Nokrek himself were on the stage. In the afternoon session Tahsin Ara, Munmun Nokrek, Dipu Bhowmik and Kajal Chisim received freelancer-entrepreneur honours, and Rahitul Islam, whose books have chronicled the country's freelancers, was named "Voice of Freelancers". "Struggle is part of our life," Nokrek said in closing. "Obstacles will come, but the mindset to face them is what takes us forward."
The story readers of this site already know
Tech BD's archive has followed Nokrek IT from the beginning of its national attention. In February 2022 we reported on the institute's trainees in the villages of Madhupur forest, working for American clients on 2G signal with modems tied to lychee trees. Three weeks later Grameenphone's chief executive, having read the report, put a temporary 4G tower in Gaira, and the villages held a festival. In August 2022 we met Trishna Dio, a Nokrek graduate in Kakorkandi, Sherpur, who had turned down a job in Australia to earn Tk 60,000 to 86,000 a month from her village, limited only by load-shedding; she later received a laptop from the prime minister. The people honoured on Friday are the next chapter of the same story.
Why ten years is the number that matters
Freelancing training in Bangladesh is a crowded, often dishonest business; every month a new Facebook page promises a marketplace income in 30 days for a fee. Nokrek IT's claim to be different rests on time. It has kept the same founder, the same base in the north, a focus on Garo and other marginalised young people, and graduates who are still working, which is the only measurement that counts. Five branches, a lakh trainees and a decade are not a marketing statistic. They are what it looks like when a courtyard experiment turns into an institution, and the reason a national newspaper's operations manager and a Catholic college principal turned up to a freelancing school's birthday.
