Urbanization, Migration Systems within Bangladesh and Translocal Social Spaces
Mobility marks the daily life of many people in Bangladesh. It is a strategy to secure their livelihoods. Annually, hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshis leave to work abroad, but internal migration has also been on the rise in recent years against the backdrop of a growing garments industry.

The growth of the garments industry triggered rising internal migration to Bangladesh’s large cities. The production and export of textiles started in the early 1980s, which gradually changed Bangladesh’s role in the global economy fundamentally. In 1985, roughly 120,000 people worked in 380 garment factories, while it was around 1.6 million workers in 3,200 factories in 2000, and even four million workers in 4,200 factories in 2014[2]. This industrial boom also led to social transformations as young rural women, who did not migrate in large numbers before, gained access to livelihood opportunities in the urban factories[3]. The garment factories are predominantly situated in and around the capital city, which fueled the growth of Dhaka’s economy and population (see Table 6). Other major cities could not compete with Dhaka’s extensive population growth. Chittagong, for instance, once the major harbor city of Bangladesh, not only lost economic weight, its share of the total urban population also decreased significantly.
Table 6: Population and city development in Bangladesh (in thousand people)
1950 | 1960 | 1970 | 1980 | 1990 | 2000 | 2010 | 2020 | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Bangladesh (total population) | 37,895 | 49,537 | 66,309 | 82,498 | 107,386 | 132,383 | 151,152 | 169,566 |
Urban population | 1,623 | 2,544 | 5,035 | 12,252 | 21,275 | 31,230 | 46,035 | 64,480 |
% of the total population | 4% | 5% | 8% | 15% | 20% | 24% | 31% | 38% |
Dhaka | 336 | 508 | 1,374 | 3,266 | 6,621 | 10,285 | 14,731 | 20,989 |
% of the total population | 1% | 1% | 2% | 4% | 6% | 8% | 10% | 12% |
% of the urban population | 21% | 20% | 27% | 27% | 31% | 33% | 32% | 33% |
Chittagong | 289 | 360 | 723 | 1,340 | 2,023 | 3,308 | 4,106 | 5,155 |
% of the urban population | 18% | 14% | 14% | 11% | 10% | 11% | 9% | 8% |
Khulna | 61 | 123 | 310 | 627 | 985 | 1,247 | 1,098 | 1,039 |
% of the urban population | 4% | 5% | 6% | 5% | 5% | 4% | 2% | 2% |
Rajshahi | 39 | 56 | 105 | 238 | 521 | 678 | 786 | 943 |
% of the urban population | 2% | 2% | 2% | 2% | 2% | 2% | 2% | 2% |
Source: UN (2014), World Urbanization Prospects, the 2014 Revision, New York: United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, http://esa.un.org/unpd/wup/ (accessed: 2-4-2015).
Inside Bangladesh, migrants move in order to earn extra cash-income that is needed for their family’s daily consumption, to overcome livelihood crises such as hunger during the annual lean season, to diversify risks and buffer shocks such as failed harvests, or to invest in their own future through better education or better jobs. Several migration systems coexist: permanent rural-urban and urban-urban migration, temporary migration to cities, and seasonal labor migration to agricultural regions. People’s access to migration opportunities and their choice of destinations reflects existing patterns of social inequality: Members from more affluent households move to urban destinations for secure employment in the formal economy or for higher education. The rural "middle class" (and "lower class") either goes to cities like Dhaka to work in the garments industries, the construction sector or the informal economy, or temporarily moves to other rural regions in order to work as agricultural laborers during the harvest seasons. The poorest people often cannot afford the initial investments needed for migration, nor do they have access to necessary networks or even the physical capability to migrate at all. They remain locally "trapped" in poverty[4].
This article is part of the country profile Bangladesh.
Fußnoten
- 1.
- BBS (2012), p. 322.
- 2.
- According to the data provided by the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association, http://www.bgmea.com.bd/home/pages/TradeInformation#.Uo2-I-Ly-no (accessed: 3-21-2015).
- 3.
- Afsar (2005); World Bank (2007); Siddiqui et al. (2010).
- 4.
- See Afsar (2005), Etzold et al. (2014), and Peth/Birtel (2015) for more insights into the relation between social inequality and (seasonal) labor migration.
- 5.
- See, for instance, Steinbrink (2009), Brickel/Datta (2011) or Greiner/Sakdapolrak (2013) for an introduction to the academic literature on transnationalism, translocality and translocal livelihoods.
- 6.
- See Gardner (1995), Danneker (2005), and Zeitlyn (2012) for vivid descriptions of Bangladeshi international migrants and the diaspora’s transnational lives, and Etzold (2014), Peth/Birtel (2015), and Sterly (2015) for explorations into the translocal lives of internal migrants and seasonal workers.
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