"Last month I earned 86,000 taka," Trishna Dio said in Mymensingh on a Saturday in August 2022. "It is never less than sixty thousand. But the electricity goes for hours every day in the village, and even with an IPS you cannot run a laptop that long. If we had power, I would be earning two lakh a month." She said it with more frustration than pride, which tells you what kind of freelancer she is.
From HR in Dhaka to a courtyard in Sherpur
Dio, a member of the Garo community, grew up in Kakorkandi union in Nalitabari upazila, Sherpur, near the Indian border. She finished an MBA at the Asian University of Bangladesh in 2019 and took a human-resources job in Dhaka. She hated it, quit, went home, and sent out CVs for months without a reply. Then someone mentioned that people earned from freelancing. She enrolled in a graphic design course at Nokrek IT Institute in Mymensingh, the training school founded by Garo freelancer Subir Nokrek, and travelled from the village every Friday and Saturday for classes.
Six months after finishing, she landed her first order: $86. The client liked the work and gave her seven more. Today she designs posters, business cards, social-media campaigns, ID cards, restaurant menus and flyers for clients abroad. "A Bangladeshi client once made me change one design 17 times," she said. "Slowly the experience grew, the good orders came, and the income followed."
The job she refused
A company in Australia offered her a job outright, sponsorship included. Her father asked the question that settled it: "If you can earn sitting in the village, what is the point of going to Australia?" She stayed. The village, which had whispered about a woman who sat at a computer all day and asked whether that could possibly earn money, has stopped asking. She wants to train Kakorkandi's young people next.
The rival that is not the internet
Unlike the Madhupur freelancers whose story Prothom Alo told in February, Dio's problem is not signal. It is the power grid. Bangladesh began scheduled load-shedding in July 2022 as the gas crisis bit, and rural upazilas like Nalitabari have borne the longest cuts, several hours a day. For a freelancer the arithmetic is brutal: a two-hour cut in the middle of a deadline in Sydney's afternoon is a lost client. An IPS runs a laptop for a while; it does not run a router, a monitor and a fan through a five-hour outage. Her Tk 2 lakh estimate is the size of the gap between what rural Bangladesh's freelancers are and what they could be.
Update: within a week of this report, the local power office rescheduled Kakorkandi's load-shedding, and in October Dio received a laptop from the prime minister through the ICT Division.
