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.
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. Internal migration is thus an everyday practice in Bangladesh. Nonetheless, nine out of ten people have not (yet) been mobile themselves.
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. 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. 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, Externer Link: 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.
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". 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.
Dr. Benjamin Etzold is Research Associate and Lecturer at the Department of Geography of Bonn University, Germany. He wrote his dissertation on street trading in the mega city Dhaka and was part of a research project on climate change, hunger and migration in Bangladesh. His research foci are development geography and migration studies with a focus on social vulnerability and labor conditions. Email: E-Mail Link: etzold@giub.uni-bonn.de
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