Published: 01:01 AM, 01 May 2026
A Longitudinal Study of Dhaka’s Urban Migration and Poverty Dilemma
Conceptual map of migration studies on Everett Lee’s refer to push factors relate to the place of origin, and pull factors relate to the place of destination. “Distance and transportation are intervening obstacles to selecting destination place which influence migration,” Lee added. Due to poverty in the rural areas and the prospect of getting a better life in the towns people migrate from villages to towns. This is called rural-urban migration. Dhaka is choking under the inflow of people, grossly overpopulated and its infrastructure in collapse Todaro's model of migration is mainly the result of rational economic calculations of the relative benefits and costs. b) The decision to migrate is based on the 'expected' U-R real wage differential rather than the actual one. c) The chance of getting a job in the city is inversely proportional to the unemployment rate of the city.
Key Drivers are: Dhaka: Development from the top and economic inequality. Rural land shortages dire Climate disasters. Dhaka's main impacts are: Growth of slums: In the absence of affordable housing, migrants live in overcrowded and unhealthy slums. Congestion and shortages: Strains on transport, water and electricity systems. Pollution – Toxic air and monsoonal flooding due to poor waste management. Breakdown of services: Hospitals and schools are overwhelmed with huge demand.Job insecurity: low wages in informal employment due to surplus labor. Increasing crime: Scarcity of resources creates social tensions and security threats.
‘Destination Dhaka’ by Anwara Begum is an updated academic research work but so much more. It is a long-term indictment of a development model that has repeatedly failed its most vulnerable internal migrants. Through a mapping of the very same problems, from pavement to slum and back again, over almost three decades, she shows that Dhaka’s urban crisis is not a temporary overflow but a permanent feature of unequal growth. For anyone who thinks a megacity can absorb rural millions without shelter, security or dignity, this book is a devastating corrective. Destination Dhaka doesn’t merely document poverty; it demands that we cease asking why migrants come to the city, and start asking why the city won’t really accept them. For a young farmer who sees his land wash away as the river comes in northern Bangladesh or a mother running from domestic violence in the remote village, the picture of Dhaka is often paradoxical. From afar it is a city of glittering billboards, crowded markets and the promise of a wage - any wage. But for hundreds of thousands who make the journey, the reality is a patch of hard concrete, a shared slum latrine and the constant threat of eviction.
This is the central tension that Anwara Begum explores in her newly revised landmark study Destination Dhaka: Urban Migration: Expectations and Reality (Second Edition, University Press Limited, January 2025). First published in 1999, this updated edition features a critical 2022 follow-up investigation, resulting in a rare, 29-year longitudinal portrait of what happens to those who trade rural destitution for urban survival. The choice of two poverties: Begum is a veteran researcher of social deprivation in Bangladesh and she refuses to romanticize either side of the migration equation. From the first chapter she introduces what she calls the “migration paradox” – the notion that migration to Dhaka is rarely a free choice for prosperity. Instead it is a choice between two kinds of suffering, forced. The push factors in the rural areas like landlessness, seasonal hunger (monga), lack of healthcare and climate displacement are so severe that even the worst urban conditions seem better. The author does not flinch from this brutal calculus: for many, the pavement of Dhaka is upward mobility because it is not the mud floor of a flooded homestead. The comparative structure is the book’s greatest strength. Begum traces the persistent gap between expectation and reality, using data from her original study in 1993 and a follow-up in 2022. Expectations: A steady job. A room under a corrugated tin roof. Security for your children. A way out of poverty. Reality (1993 & 2022): Crowded slums, the constant insecurity of pavement dwelling (sleeping on footpaths), informal day labour without a contract, exploitation by middlemen and a municipal government perpetually overwhelmed by the city’s breakneck growth. Data from 2022 is especially sobering. The fundamental problems Begum identified in the early 1990s — lack of shelter, basic sanitation and secure tenure for the poorest migrants — have not gone away despite three decades of economic growth in Bangladesh. The problems have only grown as Dhaka has become one of the most densely populated megacities in the world.
Studies of urban poverty are usually snapshots. Begum has produced a motion picture. In a painstakingly constructed “rationale for the 2022 follow-up study on pavement dwellers,” she purposefully moves the analysis from a momentary crisis to a permanent structural failure.The book doesn’t just ask, “Who is living on the streets today? It asks, “What has changed in 29 years? Disturbingly little, her findings showed. The faces on the pavement may be younger or older, but the dynamics of exploitation and neglect are hauntingly consistent. This long view makes Destination Dhaka an essential piece of evidence for anyone who claims that economic growth alone solves urban poverty. In Chapter 2, ‘The Need to Conceptualize Migration’, Begum moves from the raw data to question the very theories academics use to understand movement. Her critique of classical models (e.g. ‘push-pull’ or ‘dual economy’ theories) is that they do not understand the specific texture of Bangladeshi internal migration. Her argument is subtle but powerful: Standard theories often assume a rational actor moving toward a net gain. Begum’s subjects aren’t trying to maximize utility. They’re trying to minimize catastrophe. She calls for a new theoretical approach grounded in the reality of South Asian urban informality, one that respects the agency of pavement dwellers without ignoring the brutal structures that keep them there.
This is more than an academic exercise. The book is essential reading for researchers in sociology, development economics and urban planning, but it has urgent practical audiences. Policy Makers in Bangladesh The repeated diagnosis of “problems of urban management” is a direct call to Dhaka’s city corporations and the Ministry of Housing. Begum offers no easy answers but presents damning evidence that current policies are failing the poorest. International Development Organizations: This longitudinal case study provides some hard lessons for UN-Habitat, the World Bank and IOM about what does not work when it comes to addressing informal settlements in the long run. NGO practitioners: Organizations working on shelter, livelihood, and water/sanitation will find granular, time-tested data of the specific vulnerabilities of pavement dwellers, often the most invisible of the urban homeless.
Strengths and Weaknesses: Strong points: The second edition in 2025 comes at a particularly opportune moment as Dhaka’s population continues to surge. The explicit focus on pavement dwellers (not merely slum dwellers) caters to the most vulnerable section of the urban poor. It provides a simple narrative arc, expectation v reality, that makes complex data accessible. The title written by the book Anwara Begum (author) suggests a general study of “urban migration”, but the content is heavily weighted towards the poorest migrants. In future may focus on better-off internal migrants (e.g., garment workers with dormitory housing). Bibliographic Information: Anwar Begum. Destination Dhaka: Urban Migration: Expectations and Reality Second and Enlarged Edition. Dhaka: The University Press Limited, January 2024. ISBN: 978 984 506 456 9
Dhaka is one of the most densely populated capitals in the world in 2026 with population density of more than 23,953 to 33,800-plus people per square kilometer in the metropolitan area. This ranges from an average of around 0.024 to 0.034 persons per m2 across the city, but some slums are in excess of 220,000 per sq. km (Today, Dhaka is so overcrowded that it can barely function, and Bangladesh is still experiencing soaring rural-urban migration. Views are split among Nobel laureates: Arthur Lewis views such movement as a necessary engine of structural transformation; Joseph Stiglitz highlights the dangers of exacerbating regional inequality; and Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo would probably refer to the micro-evidence that migration often does not raise the poorest above survival levels. The new economics of labor migration reinterprets the process not as a matter of individual wage-seeking, but as a household survival strategy to diversify income and cope with climate and economic shocks. Dhaka is overburdened, only decentralization can help. Hence, the Government needs to be cautious and steps should be taken against the corrupt developers who have not provided and handed over the flats in due time and have done many irregularities. A Longitudinal Study of Bangladesh’s Urban Migration, Poverty Dilemma Dhaka city needs planned development. We have to go long way through civic sense. The Gini coefficient of the urban slums in Dhaka city has to be pro-poverty free and marginalization and pauperization need to be arrested with stopping mob violence and slang use of mother tongue over the years. Urban slum dwellers have to come out of the vicious circle of poverty. The theory of diaspora is very much alive and relevant to internal migration, even though it has traditionally been associated with international movement. In modern scholarship, this framework has increasingly been used in relation to internal, domestic movements, whereas diaspora studies have tended to focus on trans-border, transnational connections (dispersal across state borders).
Dhaka’s population has outgrown its ability to create formal jobs. If the expected urban earnings are not forthcoming, vulnerable migrants may end up in slums or be exploited by criminal networks, in line with the Harris-Todaro model. Data show a worrying increase in robberies and muggings. Gangs target pedestrians and passengers for phones and wallets, sometimes hijacking auto-rickshaws by posing as riders or drugging drivers. That highlights an urban paradox that economists such as Stiglitz and Lewis have pointed out. Millions have moved to Dhaka because of river erosion, climate change and loss of jobs on farms. Many lack skills or capital and become drivers of battery- or manual rickshaws, the easiest way to earn a daily cash income. This has flooded Dhaka with an estimated 1.2 million auto-rickshaws, creating livelihoods but also gridlock, accidents and traffic violations. A poor villager deciding to take up rickshaw driving is itself a rational survival choice. Hundreds of thousands in total doing this breaks transport systems, safety nets and public order. The rise in illegal rickshaws, phone snatching and decline of law and order is a classic example of the negative fallout of unplanned rural-urban migration. Dhaka Metropolitan Police and city corporations are facing a manpower shortage to curb illegal vehicles and street crime. Even big seizures and operations won’t t keep up with the daily flow of people.
Professor Dr. Muhammad
Mahboob Ali teaches Economics
in Bangladesh University of
Business and Technology
(BUBT), Dhaka.
