When it comes to geography, and the whole thing about geography affecting people
and the societies they live in, Bangladesh is usually looked at by the rest of the world with…
I think pity would be the right word here. The People’s Republic of Bangladesh is the densest
country on Earth, excluding all the hilariously tiny ones, with more people than all of Russia
squeezed into an area the size of Iowa or about one and a half Portugals. It is also one of the
poorer countries in the world, and not to mention one of the most endangered by the effects of
climate change. But what if I told you that this little country’s geography is actually
one of the best a country could ask for? And in fact, that might actually be part of the problem.
[This video was sponsored by Wondrium]
Along a river valley in the north of India, at the foothills of the Himalayas, arose the
civilizations of India. Today, the Republic of India has its core along this river, the mighty
Ganges, the lifeblood of a region home to 650 million people. Go further downstream however,
where the locals start to call it the Padma, it meets up with the Jamuna (or Brahmaputra)
and the Meghna River to form the largest river delta on the planet before spilling out into
the Indian Ocean, forming the region we know as Bengal. Thanks to the alluvial silt brought down
from the Himalayas and into the Indo-Gangetic Plain, and the water trapped by the Himalayas,
the region of Bengal has some of the richest soil for agriculture in the world.
Being one of the most productive agricultural regions in all of South Asia, the area had been
known for its cotton, silk, and jute production, which naturally attracted the various European
powers and their East India companies, establishing trading posts in the area,
at least until the British muscled everyone out for control over the entire subcontinent. The
city of Calcutta (or Kolkata) in West Bengal became the capital of the Bengal Province, and
by the end of the 19th century the second-largest city in the British Empire, only behind London.
Of course not all of the country is exactly like this. In the Chittagong Hill Tracts in the east,
one of the few parts of the country not at sea level, the population is largely made up
of different tribal communities, often referred to under the term adivasis. Adivasi isn’t the name of
a particular ethnic group, rather a catch-all term for tribal peoples across the Indian Subcontinent,
including ethnic groups like the Chakma, which… hang on, they have their own writing system too?
In the Hill Tracts, a large portion of the population is Buddhist,
and many of these groups were actually converted to Christianity by Protestant
missionaries, as setting them to the majority Islamic and Hindu
populations of the rest of the country, for whom these modern borders were drawn.
Bangladesh as we see it today is a relatively new concept. While Bengal and its distinct culture,
language, customs, writing system, and all that date back centuries or millennia,
British Bengal was divided between a Hindu west and Muslim east in 1905 as an ‘administrative
reform’. It was undone only six years later, but by then the seeds of this idea of dividing
Bengal in this way had been planted. When India was partitioned along religious lines in 1947,
East Bengal became East Pakistan, part of the larger country of Pakistan. Now I’m not
supposed to have opinions on this channel, but I think a lot of you can agree that–
in a geographic sense– these borders are pretty much how not to put a country together, and the
way it was managed did not make things easier. The East had a considerably larger population
than the West, and its products made up the bulk of the country’s exports, however the national
government was still based in the West, led mostly by politicians from the western half with very
few Bengalis in their midst, and while most of the country‘s exports came out of Bangladesh,
most of the money went toward the West. Not to mention the two parts of the country were
separated by 1,600km of hostile territory. The handling of the 1965 Indo-Pakistan War,
and particularly the fallout of the 1970 Bhola Cyclone (the deadliest tropical cyclone on record)
ultimately led to the Bangladesh Liberation War the following year… and the Bangladesh genocide.
Now if you want to learn more about all this… you know what, let’s do the sponsor
stuff right now and get back to the video in a minute, I think this is a pretty good segue.
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Someone who can give you a far deeper understanding of Bangladesh’s port-partition
history than I reasonably could is Oberlin history professor Michael H. Fisher, whose course on
Indian history, more specifically episode 33 on independent Bangladesh, is what a large portion
of this video was based off of, and which you can watch right now in its entirety on Wondrium!
Now maybe you don’t want to learn about Bangladesh (in which case, why did you click on this video?),
maybe you just want to learn about… basically anything else. Fret not, because Wondrium
has thousands of great courses, plus they are constantly adding new content to their library
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Look, they have pretty much everything here, why not check out their collection yourself–
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After achieving independence for real in 1971, Bangladesh was not left with many cards to play.
Aside from doubling down on the clothing industry (which does seem to be helping make the country
richer), the country struggled to get their act together governmentally. According to Transparency
International, Bangladesh ranks 147th out of 180 countries in corruption, seven places worse than
neighboring Myanmar. Although the devastating famine that came shortly after achieving
independence has long passed into the history books, and reports suggest the country to be
self-sufficient in food production, a significant portion of the population is still malnourished.
The fact that the entire region lies on a river delta also leads to the precarious
nature of it being very low and very flat– and very low and very flat, plus very wet,
equals very floodable, especially when a cyclone strikes, which can
flood vast swathes of the entire country. In recent decades as well, the Ganges has also
become one of the most polluted major rivers in the world, particularly from industrial runoff.
Where many of the issues afflicting Bangladesh all come to a head is in
the capital and by far largest city Dhaka, with a metro population of nearly 20 million,
making it one of the largest cities on the planet… and in fact in the solar system. Four times larger
than the second largest city Chittagong (or Chattogram), Dhaka is… a troubled city. Dhaka
is one of the most polluted cities in the world, and yet its population is still growing rapidly,
particularly from those migrating from rural regions, especially as more snow in the
Himalayas begins to melt into the country’s more than 700 rivers, raising water levels
across the nation. Remember, the country is basically just one giant river delta.
One of Dhaka’s biggest issues is a lack of coordination. From the colonial era, the city of
Dhaka was managed by the Dhaka City Corporation, until 2011 when it was split in twain,
one north and one south. Dhaka’s city services are divided amongst several national authorities,
instead of one municipal authority, for example the Dhaka Metropolitan Police is a subset of the
Bangladesh Police which operates under the Ministry of Home Affairs, while RAJUK– which
coordinates urban planning within the city– is operated under the Ministry of Housing and Public
Works. With more than fifty different agencies providing different services for different parts
of the megacity in this cobbled-together nature, the task of managing Dhaka and maintaining its
services… well it’s essentially like playing Cities: Skylines on ultra hardcore mode while
sharing a city between several other players who might not be interested in cooperating.
Really, Bangladesh serves as a prime example of two things: first, it’s important to preserve
the natural environment around us, lest it come back to bite us in the–; and second,
while it is important to take care of the environment, we also have to acknowledge
that it’s practically impossible to do so when you don’t have the resources to build solarpunk
utopias for 160 million people when your country has only recently industrialized. Look, I think
we can deal with keeping Florida if it means helping out Bangladesh, that’s all I’m saying.