Muri costing 75 taka a kilo, sold wholesale at 90

Baruikhali in Kachua, Bagerhat, was known locally as the muri village, where over a hundred families once hand-fried puffed rice for the whole district. The arithmetic no longer works: coarse paddy costs 1,500 taka a maund plus 200 taka to boil, dry and mill into rice, and a maund yields 24 kg of muri - 75 taka a kg to make against 90 wholesale and 100 retail. Machine-made packet muri took the market in between, and a hand-made product cannot fight it on price. This fryer, in his sixties and three decades in the trade, says the income no longer feeds the family three times a day, so he has bought his son a van instead. At least fifty families have left muri-frying for other work in four or five years, and another fryer who used to sell 10 maunds across two weekly haats now cannot move five in a week.