A bomb whose creation would tip the scales of global power, a nuclear physicist who sought to redress the balance.

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This programme contains descriptions of a killing involving weapons.

Wake up from your patriarchal slumber is the essential message of this song delivered to all Bengali women.

It's a chorus which references the feminist poet Bergom Rukia, whose writings and activist spirit from the early 1900s are still being kept alive today,

by these women in the villages of Southwest Bangladesh.

I'm Faria Masoud and for this week's documentary on the BBC World Service, I've been spending time with women here who've shown collective strength in pursuit of their rights and courage.

Carrying only bamboo sticks wearing cotton saries and with little formal education, the women farmers fight against a powerful economic force.

That's the multi-billion dollar global industry for tiger prawns and shrimps.

Shrimf farming in this region is currently the second largest foreign currency earning sector after clothing and it's worth up to about 500 million US dollars in export for the Bangladesh economy.

You can see it everywhere around us here, rectangles and squares of water enclosed by mud and grassy banks which stretch way back into the distance.

According to a 2020 study, land covered by shrimp farms in this surrounding coastal district almost doubled in terms of percentage land area between 1990 and 2016.

So it grew from 22 to 38% in one sub-district but actually it's thought to cover the majority of land in this whole region.

Of course, this expansion of shrimp farming has not been without cost.

I was fine before but I've been having menstrual problems for a while now. I now have a period twice a month and each one last three days.

We are so busy with work that we don't have time to visit the doctor.

The doctor has been working on the shrimp farms around here for about a decade, her working day runs from eight in the morning until one o'clock in the afternoon and at certain times of the shrimp's three month growth cycle, she has to stand waist high in salt water, saline water that also contains chemical fertilizers.

We women workers have various uterus problems due to the salt water. We also suffer from itching disease and for all this we earn only 200 Bangladeshi Taka a day.

That's just over two dollars a day and 4,000 Taka almost 50 dollars a month which is well below the minimum wage which for the country's urban garment industry is double that.

The menstrual problems Bolshevorthy describes are corroborated by other women we spoke to and the incidences of scabies in shrimp farmers has been documented by studies looking at the world's other major shrimp producer Vietnam.

According to the World Bank women are thought to hold about 1.4 million of an estimated 17.8 million jobs in Bangladesh's total aquaculture production industry.

The extra income that this has provided families has not only increased incomes but it's contributed to better infrastructure, literacy rates and empowerment of women earners.

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