Mohammad Sharif Sarker’s factory is in many ways a model. Spread over three spacious floors in Ashulia, a suburb of Bangladesh’s capital Dhaka, hundreds of young women and men sit in orderly assembly lines, sewing machines before them, ready to stitch trendy flat-brim caps for export.
There’s only one problem: Sarker and his workers are sitting in the dark, their machines idle. Ashulia is currently in the middle of one of the daily mandatory power cuts that the government introduced in July, as Bangladesh grapples with a severe energy crunch. And with a recent government-mandated 50 per cent increase in fuel prices, Sarker has opted to keep the power off while his workers take a lunch break, rather than fire up an expensive diesel-powered generator.
“The sector will be unsettled if the price of everything keeps going up,” Sarker says. “It is the workers who will ultimately carry the burden.”