"Marginal agricultural growers from outskirts of Dhaka are welcome to these 25 market places at different city corners to sell produces without any tax or subscription to anybody," BDR's Dhaka sector commander Colonel Mohammad Mojibul Haque told newsmen at the headquarters of the paramilitary troops.

He said the markets would be set up in collaboration with Dhaka City Corporation (DCC) where the farmers and small traders would be encouraged to sit in these free markets on three days -- Friday, Monday and Wednesday -- from 6:00am to 12:00noon.

The small farmers are expected to sell their products like fried and flattened rice, eggs, vegetables and milk under BDR supervision at the 25 makeshift markets at Eidgahs and other open fields in the city, be said.

The BDR announcement coincided with the food ministry decision yesterday to launch Open Market Sale (OMS) of essentials, including rice and lentils, also with the assistance of the paramilitary force to monitor dishonest practices.

BDR troops on their own installed 17 open markets last week under a campaign they called "operation dal bhat" as part of the government efforts to arrest price spiral attracting huge crowd of consumers with fair price of essentials.

"We have started selling products like pulses, potatoes, onions, garlic and ginger, turmeric and sweet pumpkin while we will begin selling rice in the next two days," Colonel Mojib said.

He said the directly BDR-run open markets and BDR supervised open markets would be operated until market price becomes stable.

Mojib said on the first day of the open market operation on March 13, BDR sold products worth Tk 5.5 lakh while the amount went up to Tk 7 lakh in subsequent days and the "we expect sales to be as high as Tk 15 lakh in the next several days."

In the BDR-run markets each kilogram of potato is selling at Tk 14, onion at Tk 21, garlic at Tk 40, ginger at Tk 22, local lentils at Tk 63 and imported one at Tk 46 or 48.

"We don't sell products incurring any loss for ourselves giving subsidies but we sell them at a fair price to leave an impact on the traditional markets to stabilise the prices of essentials," Mojib said.

Director operations and training of BDR Lieutenant Colonel Mohammad Abdul Halim also spoke at the press briefing.

BDR officials earlier said exorbitant profits by several intermediaries depriving producers and consumers and heightened price of several essentials at international market were fuelling the price hike.