Bangladesh in Numbers?
on From Banglatown to Bangladesh (Bangladesh), 26/Oct/2009 13:15, 34 days ago
I foundthis articlein a recent morning trawl of The Guardian online, describing the reactions of Jamie Hewlett, the guy that designed the Gorillaz, to his visit to Bangladesh. It’s an emotive piece, highlighting the horrors of climate change here, the vulnerabilities to natural disaster faced as a country, and the precariousness inherent in the everyday lives of millions.For me, it’s also interesting as it paints a quite different picture to the Bangladesh I know. This article, like the vast majority I read in the international media, presents Bangladesh as chaotic, colourful, and monolithically flat and vulnerable to floods. The first paragraph states,'There are only two numbers you need to know to grasp Bangladesh's problem. The country makes up less than 10% of the land mass of south Asia, yet more than 90% of south Asia's water passes through it on the way to the sea. Oh, and 80% of the country is floodplain.'Living and working in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, I can identify with the chaos and colour the article describes, but other numbers are required to grasp some of the problems of this area, which falls into that unelaborated, and so often overlooked, 20% of non-floodplain in Bangladesh. Here are just a few:•45:the approximate number of indigenous communities in Bangladesh, of which about 11 are found in the CHT, each with their own language, history and cultural practices.•1.6 million:the approximate number of indigenous peoples living in Bangladesh, of which about 600,000 live in the CHT.•40%:the percentage of cultivable land flooded in the CHT in the 1960s, an area in which land was already scarce due to the geographical landscape. In that pre-climate change decade, the floods came not from natural disaster, but rather in the name of‘development’: the building of Kaptai, Bangladesh’s only hydro-electric dam.•100,000:the approximate number of indigenous people displaced due to the building of the dam, few of whom received compensation, and thousands of whom fled to India.•25:the number of years of armed conflict in the CHT. Lasting from 1972 to 1997, it was between the Bangladeshi state and Shanti Bahini, the armed wing of an indigenous peoples' political party.•Zero:the number of instances in Bangladesh’s constitution which explicitly recognises the existence of indigenous peoples in the country.Of course, these numbers are themselves only a beginning. They can't show the implications of displacement and conflict for individuals, families, and communities, or consider the meanings of the attached transformations of social structures and relations. They don't measure the degradation of the area's natural resources, examine the impacts of this on people's economic survival, most of which is based in agriculture, or quantify its effects on cultures and cultural practices closely linked with land itself.And they do not look to the future of the CHT. The numbers do not give a hint as to what benefits and challenges may come with the ever-increasing influx of development actors and activities here in the years since 1997. They cannot predict what will happen as the terrors of climate change across Bangladesh become ever more real and ever more devastating. And they do not say who will watch its implications for the land of this region, or show who will listen to, who will write about, or who will read, the stories of the people here.So when I see an article in the international media employing the same statistics to give, yet again, the same view of Bangladesh, its peoples, and its environment, I can’t help but search for something different. Because the reality is that alongside the chaos, colour and flooding of this country is a diversity of histories, geographies, cultures and problems. And in that Bangladesh, questions of change – climate or otherwise – cannot be summed up in numbers, no matter how many we choose.Statistics Source:CHT Commission