"Ripples from Bengal"

As an addendum to my previous post, I thought I'd share with our readers an essay from Himal South Asian, the December 2010 essay by Afsan Choudhary "Ripples from Bengal". Drawing from the history of his family, descended from mid-19th century migrants from what's now Bangladesh to what's now West Bengal, Choudary provides a potted history of migration in Bengal--at first within, then from--from the 19th century on. Migration patterns are intimately tied to the patterns set by colonialism.

Migration – be it within national borders or beyond, voluntary or forced – has long been part of Bengali life. Anil Seal, in his seminal book India and the Emergence of Indian Nationalism talks of how the British in Bengal created the new clerical ‘babu’ class to serve their own needs, which coincided with the aspirations of the emerging Bengali middle class. Schools and colleges sprang up in response to the demand for education, but soon there were more graduates than jobs. This is what set off the internal migration from Bengal to other parts of India, particularly modern-day Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, where there was demand for an educated class. The Ganguly family of the well-known Indian film stars Kishore and Ashok Kumar was part of this Bengali migrant population.

While Bengali migrants to North India (and Burma) belonged largely to the middle classes, the journeys of the poorer migrants usually took them to the Indian Northeast. When Syed Ahmed Khan and the Nawab of Rampur (in present-day Uttar Pradesh), the former a Muslim and the latter a Hindu, came together to fight the immigrant Bengalis, they were responding to classic anti-immigrant sentiment. Their organisation, a splendid sign of interfaith political cooperation, was dedicated to fighting these new arrivals. Syed Ahmed’s virulent anti-Bengali feelings are rooted in the appearance of Bengali graduates taking jobs that locals thought were rightfully theirs. When many people in India today rail against Bangladeshi/Muslim ‘outsiders’, there are clear echoes of the rage at the arrival of Bengali Hindu migrants into the colonial United Provinces.

Migration, which is today seen as a security issue between New Delhi and Dhaka, began with little protest from local indigenous people when it came to the Northeast. There were no national borders to be crossed at that time – it was all British India, and the locals were not asked their opinion because they were poor and with little political organisation. It really did not matter whether anyone was going there, went the thinking, because no one else wanted to do so.

Between 1947 and 1971, large-scale migration was non-existent in East Pakistan save for the border areas, where national boundaries existed in the eyes of the states but not the border people. My grandfather travelled back and forth between Shillong, where he ran a restaurant, and Dhaka, where his family had moved after 1947, thus existing as a stranger in both lands. In 1965, while he was visiting Dhaka, war broke out between India and Pakistan. He was declared an enemy, his restaurant was seized by his business partner and he was rendered a pauper overnight. Till his death in the mid-1970s, Grandfather gradually retreated into his own mind, continuing to live in his Shillong home inside his head. He had experienced what many Hindus did in East Pakistan: living in two lands and then paying a price for doing so, despite the fact that the two lands look and feel – and are – so similar. Likewise, for my ‘refugee’ uncles, life in East Pakistan was brutal, as they had no networks and never managed to build or find any. They were lost in the labyrinths of failure into which most forced migrants disappear, marginalised and part of neither land, immigrants to nowhere.

[. . .]

Internal migration rem.ains a largely invisible phenomenon. Within Bangladesh, people move to harvesting work every season, creating a relatively unknown migrant culture with its alternative survival strategies and values. And as the landless population increases, so too does internal migration. Some move from the rural areas to Dhaka, choking an already dysfunctional city even as the new extreme poor populate the city in a desperate attempt to survive. Sometimes internal migration produces deadly results, as in the Chittagong Hill Tracts. From the mid-1970s, the Hill Tracts saw militant insurgency by the indigenous Chakma population and a brutal pacification attempt by the Bangladesh Army. One containment strategy was to bring in landless people from the tidal flats of the Bay of Bengal to the hills, and give them free land for cultivation. The clear idea was to create a pro-state local population to marginalise the highlanders and reduce them to a minority. The new migrants, already brutalised by poverty and natural disasters in their erstwhile homes, became vicious in protecting the land given to them. In this way, then, internal migration was successfully used as a military tool, while the indigenous highlanders lived in refugee camps in India. When they returned following an agreement in the mid-1990, few got their land back.

While emigration and migration to most areas require certain qualifications, connections and money, none of this is required when one moves to India. Duly, millions have gone across the border over the last century. This process, which was an ‘internal migration’ till 1947, thereafter became an illegal international border crossing, increasingly attached to security implications. In the Indian Northeast, clashes between migrants and local indigenous populations have resulted in regional instability, while elsewhere in India the Bengali of Bangladesh is often accused of being linked to ‘terrorist’ activities. Many of these migrants are reduced to mere shadows, living lives of wretched poverty and fear. Another destination for the very poor is Pakistan, where many work as domestic servants and in the fisheries sector, so badly off that they spark pity even among Pakistanis. Their lives as migrants are as poverty-stricken as the ones they left behind at home.

We now see three distinct trends in Bangladeshi migration: emigration for settlement to Europe, Australasia and North America; contract labour migration to the Gulf and a few Southeast Asian countries; and of course the movement of people across the border areas, mainly to India. Migration to West Asia has drawn attention due to its enormous impact on the home economy. Remittances have emerged as a key driver of economic growth and poverty reduction in Bangladesh, increasing at an average annual rate of 19 percent over the last three decades. The World Bank reports that remittances – the bulk of which come from West Asia – now exceed all other types of foreign-exchange inflow. The Bangladeshi migrants in West Asia do not constitute a monolithic block, of course. Professionals are comfortable, while labourers lead miserable lives. But when the latter return to Bangladesh, they constitute a newly rich group in impoverished rural areas, a new local elite impacting on power relations – and keeping the economy from collapsing.

Bangladesh entering the 2010s

The Economist's Asia blog Banyan has a post up exploring the mechanics of Bangladesh's upcoming census. The quality of information available to date, the reader learns, is poor and quite debatable.

According to the adjusted 2001 census figures, Bangladesh’s population stood at 129.3m (an initial count put it at 124.4m; an adjustment for the standard rate of undercounting then boosted the figure). Those familiar with the census mechanics tell of a muddle, marked by “multiple technical problems” starting with some official’s decision to procure inferior paper, which fouled up the optical-scanning process…which in turn undermined the quality of the data set. This time, donors are handling the pens and paper—the EU is chipping in over €10m ($14m), or more than a third of the total cost of the census.

The Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics’ population clock claims that, at midnight today, that number had risen to 150,220,172. But many think the clock is running too slow. Bangladesh’s statisticians have almost certainly underestimated the natural population growth since the last census, according to the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research. Researchers at the Dhaka-based international research institution—it has been monitoring the country’s population for 40 years and has the longest-running and most comprehensive demographic data in the developing world—put Bangladesh’s current population at 162m.

The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) agrees, almost to the letter: it put the population at 164.4m in 2010. It is the UN body’s estimate that has enraged Bangladesh’s politicians, some of whom care about these things. A.M.A. Muhith, the finance minister, has called the UN estimate—which suggests that the government may have 14m citizens it would appear to prefer not to have—“condemnable” and “unauthorised meddling”.

The difference reflects UNFPA’s pessimistic assumptions about the speed of fertility decline. Helped along by one of the world’s most expensive fertility-reduction programmes, Bangladesh has seen a dramatic fall in its total fertility rate. In the late 1970s, women had seven children on average; by the early 1990s just over three. The fertility decline settled at a plateau in 1993-2002, but has resumed sliding since. It has not, however, made up for that lost time. In 2010, the year Bangladesh’ s National Population Policy aimed to achieve the replacement level fertility of 2.2, it still hovered at 2.5.

[. . .]

Arithmetically speaking, it is a battle over the size of a denominator—many indicators of economic development are expressed as a proportion of the total population. Politically, a small population is a nice thing to have. This is because the smaller it is, the more impressive Bangladesh’s progress on the UN’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) will look (and the warm feeling would be mutual). This refers to progress made towards the goal of halving the proportions of poor and hungry people. So the size of the population matters, either directly or indirectly, for it serves as a denominator in the vast majority of indicators by which progress on the goals in the MDG framework are measured.

A good place to start an overview of the Bangladeshi population might be to compare it with the Pakistani population. Until 1971, after all, Bangladesh was known as "East Pakistan", the eastern wing of the state that was supposed to include the Muslim-majority territories of the former Raj. The underrepresentation of East Pakistan in the country's affairs led to a regionalist movement that became a separatist movement that led to a Bangladeshi declaration of independence and eventually liberation by India. Of the two wings, East Pakistan was the most populous; estimates gave East Pakistan had 70 million versus 60 million in West Pakistan. In the early 1970s, after the half-million killed in the 1970 Dhola cyclone and the hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of civilians killed by Pakistani soldiers in the 1971 war, Bangladesh was seen as having far worse development prospects than rump Pakistan, called a "basket case" by Henry Kissinger, the sort of "hopeless" land that Paul Ehrlich would have callously abandoned to famine and mass death.

Instead, things have reversed. Even the highest estimates for Bangladesh's population place it behind the population of Pakistan, and the difference will continue to grow as Bangladeshi fertility rates remain below the comparable Pakistani figures. Bangladesh is catching up on the Human Development Index, too; indeed, Bangladesh has seen some of the highest rates of HDI growth in the world. While still lagging behind Pakistan on metrics like literacy and life expectancy, Bangladesh is catching up quickly. The Bangladeshi economy, too, has done reasonably well since the 1990s, driven by a successful garment industry and famously the home country of microcredit institutions. Tahmina Anam is right to conclude that more things are going right in Bangladesh than wrong.

Regarding Bangladeshi demographics, Mohammad Shahidul Islam at Roubini.com suggests that Bangladesh is set to enjoy the economic dividends of its advanced demographic transition.

Based on the stylized facts of the demographic transition model, one can see the dynamics of Bangladesh’s population transition. According to the United Nation’s Population Prospects 2008 database, total fertility rates (TFR) in Bangladesh have declined, from 6.85 children per woman in 1971-75 to 2.36 in 2005-2010. The TFR is projected to approach a replacement level (2.1) in the period 2015-2020. The population growth rate declined from 2.67 per cent in 1970-75 to 1.42 per cent in 2005-2010. The crude birth rate and the crude death rates in the country are now 21.6 and 6.3 (per 1000 population) respectively.

Based on these statistics, Bangladesh is now at the beginning of Stage III of population transition. In other words, it has entered the stabilization era of population transition. Bangladesh’s population transition has been following nearly the same pattern that Europe and East Asia experienced.

[. . .]

Bangladesh’s dependency ratio has declined, from 92 in 1975 to 53 in 2010. A nation’s demographic window generally opens when the dependency ratio (non-working to working age population) goes below 50. In South Asia, Bangladesh and India are projected to enjoy a large demographic window (2015-2050) thanks to a sharp decline in their dependency ratios.

[. . .]

Until the 1980s, Bangladesh’s per capita income growth was very low owing to a high dependency ratio. With a high birth rate, low death rate and subsistence economy the country’s economic development till the 1980s resulted in poor per capita income growth. However, the scenario has changed since the late 1980s and early 1990s when Bangladesh witnessed a sharp decline in population growth and a steady increase in GDP growth with low volatility.

Of special note, Bangladeshi sex ratios are better than elsewhere in the region.

Moreover, Bangladesh has done much better than many of its neighbours, including India, in terms of gender-related demographic statistics. This development will provide additional impetus to Bangladesh’s demography. With an improved sex ratio, the females’ share is approaching half of the total working age population in Bangladesh. Studies show that the actual growth rates of South Asia and other lagging regions were at least one percentage point lower than their potential growth due to gender imbalances.

I've come across anecdotal press reports of Bangladeshi women being valued as potential marriage partners in Indian states like Punjab lacking in marriageable women. Interesting possibilities lie here.

This connects to the phenomenon of Bangladeshi emigration. It is large, in absolute numbers and relative to receiving areas, as Banyan notes. There is an overseas Bangladeshi diaspora numbering somewhere in the area of four million people, mostly concentrated in Middle Eastern migrant-receiving countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates as well as to Malaysia, but including large communities in the United Kingdom and the United States, even the nucleus of a Bangladeshi-Canadian community here in Canadian Toronto. Much larger in absolute size is the scale of Bangladeshi immigration into India, most controversially into the northeastern state of Assam where the presence of Bangladeshis--Bengalis, generally--has become a political issue frequently erupting into violence, but also into culturally kin West Bengal and elsewhere in India.

This emigration, frankly, is inevitable. Before Bangladesh was East Pakistan it was East Bengal, a region with a Muslim majority separated from the region and British imperial province of Bengal certainly not because it was a self-contained unit with economically viable frontiers (as noted by Nafis Ahmad in a 1950 paper for Economic Geography) but because it had a Muslim majority population. Under British rule, East Pakistan was a producer of commodities, raw materials to be transferred to the Bengali industrial centre and port in Calcutta. The inter-state frontier led to East Pakistan being cut off from its natural hub, now in the Indian state of West Bengal. While Bangladesh has since developed its capital Dhaka as a new industrial centre and port in Chittagong, it still lags behind West Bengal economically. Critically, despite the state frontiers separating Bangladesh from neighbouring Indian states Bengal remains a functional human region in a way that--say--the Punjab divided between India and Pakistan does not, with a shared language and culture and a famously porous border and communal relations generally less fraught. In Partition, for instance, Bengal lacked the same scale of communal violence as in Punjab, while the dwindling of the Hindu proportion of the Bangladeshi population from 40% a century ago to a bit more than 9% now has as much to do with lower Bangladeshi Hindu birth rates as it does with the forced migration and/or massacre of Hindus. (A highly disproportionate share of the murdered and displaced civilians in 1971 were Hindus, targeted by Pakistanis--not their fellow Bengalis--for persecution by virtue of their religion.)

All things considered, it would be more surprising if Bangladeshis didn't Emigrate, to India and elsewhere. Whatever notable degree of economic development Bangladesh has achieved, it is ultimately still dependent on the wider world for its future, and Bangladeshi migrants are a critically important resource for their homeland, the mostly unskilled and semi-skilled labourers sending back huge volumes of remittances to their homeland despite their vulnerability--as now in Libya--to events in their adopted homelands.

A few more news links

For your reading pleasure, here's some population-related news links that I thought might interest you.

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty's Nikola Krastev observes that even though populations are aging, fiscal issues and social isolation is making the lives of the elderly difficult.

Turkey's Today Zaman observes that Turkey's population is aging swiftly, its elderly population growing more quickly than its youth population.

Ha'aretz' Lily Galili notes that ex-Soviet Jews, by virtue of their removal to the very different environment of Israel, have enjoyed a much greater lifespan than they otherwise would have and are being assimilated to Israeli norms.

The CBC comments that Nova Scotia's rapidly aging has led to serious and growing economic problems in a depopulating rural Nova Scotia.

Billboards in Atlanta claiming that relatively high abortion rates among African-American women is threatening the survival of that community are as controversial as you'd expect.

Kenya's Daily Nation reports that remittances to Kenya, about half from North America and one-quarter from Europe, reached $609 million dollars in 2009.

French Pearce in the Guardian suggests that the sharp decline in Bangladeshi fertility rates can be explained by a combination of a Green Revolution that reduced the need for labour on farms and the economic empowerment of women.