Billing and udhaar for every shop in Assam
Gamosa, tea, pitha ingredients or paddy: the bill and the udhaar move from the notebook to your phone.
Bihu weeks, garden pay days and haat mornings: where an Assam counter loses count
The Bihu weeks, when every house wants a new gamosa
Before Bihu a family comes in for a gamosa for each elder, new clothes for the children and a length of cloth for the girl who will dance. One neighbour takes it all and says he will settle after the festival. A child stands at the counter with a coin and asks for a pencil just as you are folding the cloth. By night the stock is only in your head and the page in the notebook is half written.
Families around the tea garden who wait for pay day
In the villages near a tea garden, many families buy rice, oil, soap and a little sugar on credit and clear it when the garden pays. The week before pay day your notebook is at its thickest. A man says he took two kilos of dal on Tuesday, you remember three, and there is no line to settle it. The pay day then passes with a quarrel at the counter.
One lane, three calendars: the garden, the paddy field and the loom
A shop in a lane that sells to a tea garden family, a farm family and a weaver's house is paid on three different calendars. The garden pays on its pay day, the farm after the crop is sold, the weaver when the cloth is sold. All three take goods now and settle later, and in one notebook their pages look alike, so you cannot tell which family is waiting on which day.
From the Bihu queue to the rainy-month godown
A Bihu bill that names every piece
Make one bill for the whole visit as it happens: two gamosas by the piece, a kilo of jaggery, half a kilo of til, new clothes for the children. Send it on WhatsApp to the house, and the neighbour who pays after the festival has his own page with each thing he took.
Which family waits for which day
The garden family is paid on its pay day, the paddy family at harvest, the weaver family when the cloth sells. A page for each, with dated lines, shows at a glance which family is due to clear this week and which one you should let wait. One lane, three calendars, and none of them kept in your head.
Rice, oil and cloth are stocked before the jute money comes
The jute money arrives after the crop is sold, and the lane must have the rice, oil and cloth on the shelf before that day. Read the counts of those three goods while the crop is still in the field, and you know how much to bring in so that the week the families settle is also the week they find what they came for.
Dibrugarh tea, Tinsukia oil and Dhubri paddy: the shops of Assam by district
Every district in Assam trades in its own way. Here are a few, and what keeps their shops busy.
- Dhubri depends mainly on agriculture and forest products. Paddy is the main income, and jute and mustard seed are the major cash crops.
- Incredible India calls Tinsukia Assam's industrial powerhouse for tea, oil, coal and commerce.
- Dibrugarh started Upper Assam's first public online tea auction in September 2026. 18 buyers took part and the teas averaged about Rs 207 a kg.
- Under the British, Tezpur in Sonitpur became an important centre of trade and commerce, used as a river port for the tea gardens around it.
What helps an Assam shop on haat day and before Bihu
Bills on your phone
The Bihu bill goes to the house on WhatsApp, so the elder who asked for the gamosas can read what the grandchildren carried home.
Credit book (khata)
One dated page for each family of a garden lane, so the argument about two kilos of dal on a Thursday ends at the page.
Daily reports
The days of last year's jute-crop weeks, opened one by one beside this year's, so the lane's rice and oil are ordered to what it bought then.
Orders to suppliers
An order to the weaver for twenty gamosas before Bihu, with a tick as each batch comes in.
What shop owners in Assam ask before they start
Bihu is two weeks away and the gamosas are coming in batches. How many can I promise a customer today?
The stock of that gamosa shows what has come so far. Promise only that number, and note each new batch the day it arrives, so the number you can promise rises with it.
In my lane Magh Bihu is about food and Bohag Bihu is about clothes. Can I see which goods sold in which?
Yes. Each good is its own item and each day's sales are kept, so open the days around each Bihu and read the items that went out in them.
Garden pay day and Bohag Bihu fall in the same week. How do I keep the Bihu bills from mixing with the credit?
Bill each Bihu sale as it happens, and put only the goods taken on credit on the family's page. The day's sales then show cash apart from credit.
Jute, tea and silk: what keeps the shops of Assam busy
Nagaon is one of Assam's main jute-producing districts, and the Assam Co-operative Jute Mills, the country's only co-operative jute mill, is at Silghat in Nagaon. A shop in a jute village carries many accounts that wait on one thing, the sale of the crop, so its notebook swells and shrinks with the season.
Cachar is known for its tea plantations; paddy, vegetables, pulses and tea are grown on the plains along the Barak river. A Cachar shop sells to the garden families and to the farm families on the same road, and the two buy on different days and settle in different ways.
Sualkuchi town in Kamrup district is a silk handloom cluster, often called the Manchester of Assam, where many migrant hired weavers work. Weavers who live far from home buy from the shops near the looms, and many of a shop's regular customers there may leave when the season ends.