Rural Poor Towards Dhaka

Debashish Roy, Australian National University

Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, has joined the group of world mega-cities with a population of 10.40 million in 2001 and an average growth rate 6.9 per cent over the period 1975-2000. The proliferation of squatter settlements in Dhaka, which are home to about 30 per cent of the city¡¯s population, indicates the consequences of the unprecedented rural-urban migration. The aim of this paper is to examine the dynamics of migration process towards basti (slums) of Dhaka and the changing composition of this process among three successive cohorts of migrants. This paper is based on primary data, which was collected through a survey in 2001. According to a comprehensive framework, the analysis is done by using bivariate cross-tabulations and multiple discriminant analyis. This paper concludes that only the characteristics of migrants have changed over three decades, showing that the latter migrants are more "advanced" or "better-off" than the earlier migrants.