by SHAHADAT HOSSAIN
Garment workers protest, Dhaka. PHOTO/Reazsumon/Demotix
A combination of violent rural and urban displacement have produced rings of poverty and exploitation on the outskirts of Dhaka, one of the world’s fastest growing cities.
Bangladesh is currently encountering rapid urbanisation. Dhaka the country’s capital, following prolonged rural displacement triggered by the government’s structural adjustment policies, has emerged in recent years as one of the fastest growing cities in the world.
Most new migrants to the city take shelter in the peripheries: Kamrangirchar, Keraniganj, Tongi, Gazipur, Demra, Kachpur, Narayanganj and the now infamous Savar, due to easily available, low cost housing. While those who remain in the city centre are increasingly being forced out to the peripheries due to increasing demand for urban development; as such, the overwhelming physical feature of Dhaka’s urbanisation is peripherilisation, a peripheralisation represented in rings of (sub)urban poverty enclosing the city centre.
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In Dhaka’s periphery land grabbing has become a key source of everyday crime and violence. Fraud, kidnapping and killing are common crimes directly related to land speculation in greater Dhaka. There have been numerous cases of land owner torture and expulsion from the city. For example, Manan a worker living in Kachpur I interviewed, lost his land beside the link road of Dhaka-Narayanganj after he was tortured and forced out from his land by the cardres of a local gang leader.
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Manafacturing exploitation
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In the past year more than one hundred workers have suffered burns in Tazrin Garments factory located in Savar. Recently more than a thousand workers working in garments in Rana Plaza in Savar died due to the building collapse. Thousands of workers have been injured and many of them will never be able to return to the workforce. This tragedy has attracted huge attention from international media and human rights communities. And still garments workers are demonstrating in order to raise their pay and improve the conditions of their workplace. Yet, the government has heeded little attention to the demands of the workers, workers whose labour significantly contributes to the national economy, the garment industry accounts for 76% of the country’s export earnings and 10% of its GDP. Rather, their dissent is met with violence.
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(Thanks to Robin Khundkar)