Every morning by 11, Kamal Nayan Bangur is out of his Girish Park home in Kolkata. The 70-year-old drives through the busy Central Avenue and after manoeuvring the heavy traffic of the Burra Bazaar area, he reaches his office at Clive Row, a busy trading hub in the Dalhousie area of Kolkata. It’s from here, a room with green walls that has portraits of his grandfather, that Bangur, a jute ‘broker’ or a middleman, runs his business—mostly by way of working the phone and talking to clients, under brokers, fellow brokers, importers and exporters of jute, a product that has been a part of Bangur’s family for around a century.

“When I was a little boy, my grandfather Kissen Lall Bangur used to bring me to the shop in a Victoria 203 horse carriage. I started working in 1958 after a brief training session at Hastings Jute Mill, one of the oldest jute mills in India on the banks of the Hooghly. After I began work, a cousin and I were sent to various jute mills in and around Kolkata every morning. There was a separate itinerary for the both of us and we would go and interact with jute mill owners, managers, merchant shippers and officials of European companies before coming to office. It was the perfect learning experience,” says Bangur, stopping to answering a phone call.

The shortage of jute bags for packing wheat and sugar came up in Parliament last week when members cornered the government in the Lok Sabha. The government said the shortage was due to a record procurement of wheat in Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh. Mukherjee said the Bengal jute industry had been asked to produce 25,000 additional gunny bags, up from the present 2.5 lakh a month. As plastic bags have been banned, the government is following global norms for packing sugar, wheat and rice in biodegradable jute bags.

With over 65 per cent of the total production, India is the largest producer of jute in the world and West Bengal, due to the availability of raw jute in the state, produces most of it. At present, there are around 60 jute mills in the state and most of them are located on the banks of river Hooghly near Kolkata, where the jute that’s cultivated in Murshidabad, West Dinajpur, Coochbehar, Nadia, Burdwan, Malda and Midnapore districts are brought and processed into different types of fabric.

Bangur finishes his conversation, hangs up the phone and says, “The phones don’t stop. You call me at 9 in the morning or 9 at night, I will be doing business.”

The present crisis has made it difficult for him to get consignments on time, he says, looking through his paper ledger book. Bangur sources gunny bags in bulk from mills, according to the demand of his customers. For local clients, the consignment is loaded onto trucks and for exporters, it is loaded in containers and shipped to the desired destination. “Both the mills and the buyers are my clients. If the buyer wants jute from a particular mill, I get it for him. A delivery date is also specified and a contract is drawn up,” says Bangur.

There are few jute traders left on Clive Row, says Bangur. “Earlier there were around 70-80 broker firms on this lane, it was a hub of the jute trade. Now there are only around 15 of us though jute is a hot commodity in the national and international markets,” says Bangur, preparing to take a small break for lunch.

He says the government has to come up with better policies to deal with the problem of rising demand for jute and poor supply. “The government buys more than 70 per cent of the jute produced. How is it possible to meet demand from other quarters? Now jute is a happening product. Besides gunny bags, trendy jute bags are in high demand,” he says.

But business, says Bangur, is unpredictable. “There is no future for brokers anymore. The income is quite irregular. One month you might make Rs 3,000, the next month Rs 30,000 and then again it might be even less than Rs 300. I’ve been doing this for nearly 55 years and this is the only trade I know. Earlier I had more than 80 clients. Now the number is close to 40,” he says.