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
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
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"
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Fußnoten
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BBS (2012), p. 322.
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According to the data provided by the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association, Externer Link: http://www.bgmea.com.bd/home/pages/TradeInformation#.Uo2-I-Ly-no (accessed: 3-21-2015).
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Afsar (2005); World Bank (2007); Siddiqui et al. (2010).
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See Afsar (2005), Etzold et al. (2014), and Peth/Birtel (2015) for more insights into the relation between social inequality and (seasonal) labor migration.
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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.
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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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