Urbanization in Bangladesh

The urban transition has been one of the most important changes taking place in the context of the overall demographic transition of the past two centuries. But, despite its role in remaking human society, it rarely gets into the news in any real way. That's why the headline from this week's Economist caught my eye: "Urbanization in  Bangladesh: Life after Dhaka."

In 1974 just 9% of Bangladeshis lived in towns or cities. Today 37% of the country’s 170m people do. In a few decades more than half will. The capital, Dhaka, which attracts the majority of rural migrants, has grown from 3m in 1980 to 18m today. It is “already bursting at the seams”, says Saleemul Huq of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development, a think-tank trying to bolster education and employment in eight places, including Mongla, to help absorb migrants.

Mongla is a small city of 40,000 people whose mayor wants some, or a lot, of those people going to Dhaka to move instead to Mongla, which is about an 8-hour drive south of Dhaka. Why might they be tempted to do that? At least partly because the description of living conditions in Dhaka is reminiscent of European cities in the 19th century.

According to an index compiled by the Economist Intelligence Unit, a sister company to The Economist, Dhaka, notorious for traffic jams and pollution, is the world’s third-least liveable city. Some 60% of residents live in makeshift structures, according to the Centre for Urban Studies (CUS), another think-tank. Many of these slum-dwellers lack access to clean water and sanitation and are at constant risk of eviction. 

In such conditions diseases—especially waterborne ones—thrive. Frequent bouts of illness that stop slum-dwellers from working keep them trapped in poverty, says Abdus Shaheen of Water & Sanitation for the Urban Poor, an NGO. “This, of course, hampers the wider economy, too,” he adds.

The government is working on the problem, including a program to bring better living conditions to rural residents so that they will stay down on the farm. As China found out, however, that is very unlikely to work. Building better cities is the long-term answer.