30.11.2015 | Von:

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.

Dhaka, die Hauptstadt von Bangladesch, ist eine Megastadt der Gegensätze. So liegt der größte Slum der Stadt (Karail) direkt gegenüber des Geschäfts- und Diplomatenviertels Gulshan.

Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, is a megacity of contrasts. The city's biggest slum (Karail) is located directly opposite Gulshan, the district of business and diplomats. (© Benjamin Etzold)

In 2015, Bangladesh had an estimated population of 161 million people. Two thirds of the population still lives in rural areas; one third resides in urban areas (see Table 6). But due to prevailing poverty and food insecurity in some parts of the country, regular disruptions of rural livelihoods by natural hazards such as cyclones and floods, more economic opportunities in cities, centralistic educational structures, and improved transportation networks, more and more Bangladeshis have become mobile. The 2011 population census revealed that 13.5 million people have left the administrative district in which they were born, which is ten percent of the population. Most movements take place within the country and over shorter distances. 44 percent of these 13.5 million internal migrants have moved from rural to urban areas, another 43 percent from rural to rural areas, nine percent from one city to another, and only four percent from urban to rural areas[1]. Internal migration is thus an everyday practice in Bangladesh. Nonetheless, nine out of ten people have not (yet) been mobile themselves.

Über 4.200 Textilfabriken gibt es in Bangladesch. Die meisten befinden sich in der Hauptstadt Dhaka.

There are over 4.200 garment factories in Bangladesh. Most of them are located in Dhaka, the capital. (© Benjamin Etzold)

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].

In Bangladesch produzierte Kleidung mit Containern (im Hintergrund) in die ganze Welt verschifft, dennoch leben 20 Prozent der Einwohner Dhakas in großer Armut. Obdachlose schlafen auch auf dem Dach des Hauptbahnhofes der Stadt.

Garments made in Bangladesh are exported all over the world in containers (in the background of the image). Still, 20 per cent of the population live in great poverty. The image shows homeless people sleeping on the roof of the city's central train station. (© Benjamin Etzold)

Bangladeshi families who have migrants among their members nowadays organize their livelihoods dynamically across different places. Their life is characterized through their experience of migration, their social networks across and their "simultaneous embeddedness" in specific places. They are living translocal lives and those who have migrated internationally have built "transnational social spaces"[5]. The translocal or transnational relations between migrants and those that are left at home are carefully maintained through money transfers, regular mobile phone or skype calls as well as facebook and other social media. The home village is visited regularly, in particular for traditional festivities that play an important cultural role for a community and for family life, for instance marriages, funerals or Eid-ul-Fitr at the end of the Ramadan[6].

This article is part of the country profile Bangladesh.

Fußnoten

BBS (2012), p. 322.

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).

Afsar (2005); World Bank (2007); Siddiqui et al. (2010).

See Afsar (2005), Etzold et al. (2014), and Peth/Birtel (2015) for more insights into the relation between social inequality and (seasonal) labor migration.

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.

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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