Dhaka, from the air

Since the inception of Bangladesh, the country has received approximately US$40 billion in foreign aid. Today it’s pleasing to acknowledge that economic progress is being made and things are heading in a good direction, despite some unfathomable hindrances and political mismanagement.

In the early days, the country in fact shunned foreign money under the direction of Mujib, and then nationalised a great deal of its industries under his socialist whims, a burden that future political leaders had to painfully shed, with one notable example being the death of Bangladesh’s jute industry in the last decade. Zia, on the other hand, used foreign money to incite economic growth, including the introduction of new infrastructure to aid the process. On balance, foreign aid dependence is now slowly decreasing and Bangladesh’s development initiatives have met with mixed successes.

Bangladesh’s people are at once its best resource and its most bothersome burden, as the population has skyrocketed over its short history. When Bangladesh was East Bengal in 1905, there were an estimated 29 million people living within its borders, a number which increased to 44 million just 50 years later when the region became East Pakistan. By 1981, the census reported a population of 81 million, and since then that number has almost doubled. Today, estimates range between 151 million and 155 million people, resulting in a population density of over 1,050 souls per km². This makes Bangladesh the most densely populated nation in the world (excluding several city-states like Hong Kong, Singapore or Monaco), and it feels like that when dozens of people crowd to have a gander at the strange foreigner visiting their village. Current projections estimate that by 2080, the population of Bangladesh could be 250 million.