Impressions from Bangladesh

Here I am, freshly arrived in Dhaka, Bangladesh. It is a hectic city, with 15 million people, large and spread out, with where it takes hours to get from one point to another. Airwise, it is also the most polluted city in the world.  Half the workforce is employed in household and unorganised labour, while about 800,000 work in the textile industry. Even so, unemployment remains high at 19%.The annual per capita income of Dhaka is estimated at $1,350(USD), with 34% of households living below the poverty line, including a large segment of the population coming from rural areas in search of employment, with most surviving on less than $5 a day.

A little bit about Bangladesh: Bangladesh is a developing nation. However, the poverty rate has declined by 25% since 1990, and per-capita GDP has doubled from 1975 levels. More than three-quarters of Bangladesh’s export earnings come from the garment industry in 2005. The industry began attracting foreign investors in the 1980s because of cheap labour and low conversion cost. In 2011–12 fiscal year the industry exported US$18 billion worth of products. Bangladesh has been ranked as the 4th largest clothing exporter by the WTO whereas, according to The Economist, Bangladesh is the world’s third-largest clothes-export industry. The industry now employs more than 3 million workers, 90% of whom are women.
The population of Bangladesh is 142.3 million (census 2011 result),[106] much less than recent (2007–2010) estimates of Bangladesh's population ranging from 150 to 170 million and it is the 8th most populous nation in the world. In 1951, the population was 44 million. It is also the most densely populated large country in the world. Islam is the state religion even though Bangladesh is secular. Islam is the largest religion of Bangladesh, making up 90.4% of population. Hinduism makes up 8.2% of the population, Buddhism 0.7%, Christianity 0.6%.

Dhaka is known as the rickshaw capital of the world.

Brick factories

The city adds more than 300,000 people a year; those people need homes; demand grows for brick, the predominant construction material; and the air gets more polluted. Each year, the kilns north of Dhaka produce more than 2 billion bricks.