The word ‘chanda’ once carried an almost innocent charm. Growing up, it meant pooling a few takas with friends to buy a tennis ball before a game – voluntary, communal, harmless. Even in school math books, ‘chanda’ appeared as simple arithmetic: calculating each student’s share for an annual picnic, a small lesson in cooperation as much as in numbers. But somewhere between those tidy sums and today’s Bangladesh, the word has taken on a far darker meaning. What was once a symbol of collective contribution has morphed into a system of institutionalised extraction, one that begins at the farm gate and quietly compounds its way through transport, wholesale markets, and retail, before finally landing in the consumer’s pocket.
Two recent investigative reports aired on national television brought this into sharp focus. One documented how over Tk1 crore changes hands every 24 hours inside Karwan Bazar alone. The other followed a vegetable-laden truck from Bogura to Dhaka, tracking every forced payment along the way. Watched together, they do not tell a story of isolated corruption. They reveal a sophisticated, layered economic system designed to extract wealth at every point where goods change hands.
Karwan Bazar, Bangladesh’s largest wholesale market, operates on two economies simultaneously. There is the official one, regulated by city corporation rules and covering 24 bighas of designated space. And then there is the other one, sprawling across surrounding roads and pavements, governed not by law but by a four-tier extortion hierarchy: linemen, beat chiefs, sector heads, and a coordinating layer above them all. The rates are not arbitrary. They are almost bureaucratically fixed. Of the estimated Tk1 crore collected daily, roughly Tk30 lakh comes from footpaths and surrounding roads, Tk20 lakh from the fish market, Tk20 lakh from the transport sector, and at least Tk15 lakh from the kitchen market. The remainder flows from dozens of smaller tributary channels.
The footpath economy alone operates across three distinct daily shifts. The night shift, running from 10PM to 7AM, is dominated by wholesale vegetable sellers: a 10-by 10-foot spot requires a one-time payment of Tk3 lakh and a monthly ‘rent’ of up to Tk45,000. The day shift, from 7AM to 6PM, sees retail vegetable sellers pay between Tk500 to Tk800 daily per stall. From 3PM onwards, mobile vendors selling shoes, clothing, and fruits pay a minimum of Tk1,000 daily just to stand on a public pavement.
Inside the fish market, the tariff structure is even more granular. A per-kilogram levy is charged on fish imported from India or Thailand. Fees are separately collected for ice supply, for the labour of sirdars who unload and sort, and even for placing a ‘boti’, the traditional fish-cutting blade, on the ground. Hundreds of shops operating on government roads within the fish market zone pay Tk600 to Tk1,000 daily, generating Tk8 to 10lakh from this sub-sector alone. In the kitchen market, a monthly ‘development fee’ of Tk1,500 is levied on each shop, though traders allege that at least half disappears into committee pockets rather than any actual service. Water supply to fish, meat, and poultry shops amounts to a further Tk 10 lakh monthly in forced charges.
The labour sector adds its own layer. Sirdars, the labour intermediaries who organise unloading crews, take a commission of Tk250 to Tk300 for every Tk1,000 their workers earn. The workers see none of this commission. It flows upward, like everything else.
This is not disorganised crime. It is organised commerce, with predictable rates, territorial divisions, and enforcement.
Across Bangladesh, around 932 transport owner and worker organisations collect roughly Tk1,000 per trip from trucks, ostensibly for worker welfare. According to research by Transparency International Bangladesh, buses and minibuses alone surrender Tk1,059 crore annually in such collections. Battery-powered rickshaws, roughly 10 lakhs in Dhaka at Tk150 daily and 50 lakh more across the country at Tk80, contribute nearly Tk55 crore per day nationally. Add trucks at Tk40 crore daily, intercity buses, city buses, and CNG vehicles, and the figure approaches Tk100 crore every single day.
None of this reaches ordinary workers. The drivers and conductors who pay it do not benefit from it. Ultimately, every taka is passed down the chain, arriving invisibly in the price of vegetables on your dinner table.
It is tempting, but inaccurate, to say Europe has no corruption. High-level influence peddling and lobbying occur there too. The meaningful difference is structural. In most European countries, standing on a highway and demanding money from a truck driver would be treated as a serious criminal offence, investigated by an independent agency, and prosecuted by a judiciary that cannot be shielded by political affiliation.
Denmark, Finland, New Zealand, and Singapore consistently rank among the world’s least corrupt nations on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index. What they share is not moral superiority but institutional design: independent courts, digitised transactions, traceable supply chains, and enforceable penalties that make extortion genuinely high-risk behaviour. Singapore’s zero-tolerance approach turns what is a low-risk activity in Bangladesh into a career-ending, liberty-threatening one. In Scandinavia, high levels of social trust mean informal cash economies struggle to take root, not because people are saints, but because systems make them unnecessary.
In Bangladesh, the opposite dynamic holds. Political transitions change the faces collecting the money. Names surface and recede with governments but the structure persists. The investigative report found a particularly telling illustration of this: those who once shouted ‘Joy Bangla’ to assert dominance over market territories now use ‘Zia’s Soldier’ to the same end. The slogan changes. The extortion does not.
Market analysts and traders who have spoken openly on the issue estimate that eliminating extortion at transport and wholesale levels could reduce retail prices by up to 30 percent. That is not a small number. For a family spending a significant portion of income on food, a 30 percent reduction is not economic policy. It is a livelihood change.
The path there is not mysterious. Full digitalisation of payments at markets and transport terminals would eliminate cash transactions that make extortion invisible. Real-time tracking of truck movement and market allocations would break the hidden layer model. Independent investigation and fast-track prosecution would convert extortion from a low-risk side income into a high-stakes gamble. Critically, public opinion must stop treating this as normal. Social tolerance of these practices is as much a structural enabler as weak enforcement.
The Commerce Minister has recently declared that syndicate-controlled markets will no longer be tolerated. Such declarations are welcome. But announcements must be followed by architecture, the institutional plumbing that makes the declared intent durable across political cycles.
Until then, the truck will stop at the checkpoint. The eggplant will cost Tk 100. And somewhere between Bogura and your kitchen, the extortion economy will quietly collect its commission.
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author
The author is a writer, researcher, and environmentalist. He can be reached at [email protected]
