ETHNOMAD
When Growth Pretends to Be Development
Bangladesh’s transformation has brought jobs, roads, exports, and consumption, but an elder near the India border saw the distinction more clearly: change is not development.
Written by Dr Tom Corcoran
Published by ETHNOMAD
In a forest-edge village near the India border, I asked a group of Indigenous elders a simple question. Had life changed much since they were children? One elderly man nodded, but he did not answer quickly. He paused, looked at me, and said:
“Yes, we have seen a lot of change. But no development.”
That sentence has stayed with me because it cuts through much of the language Bangladesh has grown used to hearing about itself. Change is everywhere. Roads have arrived. Phones are in every hand. Children go to school. Markets reach deeper into rural life. Cash moves faster. Land is bought, sold, leased, divided, and disputed. Young people leave for towns, factories, universities, and foreign labour markets. Houses change, crops change, forests retreat, languages weaken, and village life is drawn ever more tightly into the national economy. But change is not the same as development.
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For decades, Bangladesh has occupied a central place in the global development conversation. It has been studied, funded, measured, praised, corrected, advised, and presented as proof that a poor country can rise. The language is familiar: poverty reduction, women’s empowerment, export growth, microfinance, infrastructure, resilience, graduation, transformation.
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Some of this is real. It would be dishonest to deny it. Bangladesh has achieved what many countries have failed to achieve. Yet the elder’s sentence forces a harder question. Has Bangladesh developed, or has it mainly grown?
Growth asks how much more is being produced, exported, built, bought, sold, and consumed. Development asks what kind of life is becoming possible, and for whom. A flyover, a factory, and a shopping mall can all be growth. Rising GDP, a city of apartment towers, private cars, domestic workers, guards, drivers, and air-conditioned rooms can look like progress from a distance, but development should have a much higher standard.
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It asks whether people live with greater dignity, not only higher consumption. It asks whether a farmer can remain on the land without being trapped in poverty. Whether rivers are still alive. Whether forests can still sustain life. Whether Indigenous communities can keep their language, land, and knowledge. Whether workers earn enough to live a decent life. Whether children inherit more than debt, heat, pollution, displacement, and the obligation to leave.
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It also asks an uncomfortable urban question. If development means that wealthier households in Dhaka can employ more drivers, cleaners, cooks, guards, nannies, and delivery riders, then we should be honest about what kind of development that is. It may be comfort. It may be consumption. It may be class power made more convenient, but it is not necessarily development. A developed society is not one where the rich have more people serving them. It is one where fewer people are forced into lives of permanent service because land, wages, education, housing, and public systems have failed to give them better choices. That is the distinction the elder understood. He had seen roads, markets, schools, projects, promises, and the language of improvement. What he had not seen was development in the fuller sense: a life made more secure, dignified, rooted, and sustainable. Bangladesh has grown. No serious person can deny that. The harder question is whether too much of that growth has been mistaken for development.
At a sewing machine in Bangladesh, national growth becomes intimate: a woman’s hands, a day’s wage, a global supply chain, and a garment destined for another life elsewhere. The clothing industry changed Bangladesh, but development asks a deeper question: has it made workers more secure, or merely made their labour more valuable to others?
The Low-Wage Engine
One of the clearest examples of this confusion is the garment industry. Bangladesh became one of the world’s great clothing producers. Shirts, trousers, jackets, uniforms, and fast fashion moved from Bangladeshi factories into wardrobes across Europe, North America, and beyond. The achievement was real. The ready-made garment sector became the country’s dominant export earner, accounting for roughly four-fifths of total export earnings. In 2024, apparel exports were worth about US$38.48 billion. Millions of jobs were created, and women entered wage labour on a scale that changed households, villages, migration patterns, and the national economy.
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But the foundation of this success was never only productivity. It was cheap labour. That is the part of the development story that often softens. The garment sector may not be the largest part of Bangladesh’s whole economy, but it is one of the sectors that taught the country what labour should cost. The industry directly employs around 4.2 million workers, most of them women. In late 2023, after protests and wage negotiations, the monthly minimum wage for garment workers was fixed at Tk 12,500. Workers had demanded Tk 23,000.
That gap matters.​ It reveals the economic model beneath the success story. Bangladesh’s competitive advantage has long rested on the low price of its workers. Once that logic settles into an economy, it does not stay inside the factory. It travels into construction sites, farms, hotels, apartment blocks, delivery apps, security gates, and private homes. It shapes what a society believes labour is worth. This is how growth becomes a social order.
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The factory not only produces garments. It produces expectations about wages, time, obedience, endurance, and human value. It tells the market that labour is available, disciplined, replaceable, and cheap. It tells the middle class that service should be affordable. It tells investors that competitiveness means keeping wages low. It tells the government that export earnings can too easily stand in for dignity. The environmental cost follows the same pattern. The rivers absorb what the balance sheet does not. Textile production is not only sewing. It is washing, dyeing, finishing, chemicals, heat, water, energy, discharge, and waste. Industrial pollution accounts for a major share of pollution in the Dhaka watershed, with textiles among the largest contributors after tanneries. Hundreds of washing, dyeing, and finishing factories discharge wastewater into rivers around Dhaka.
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This is the hidden geography of cheap clothing. The garment leaves the country. The pollution stays.
The Buriganga, Turag, Balu, Sitalakhya, and Karnaphuli have all carried the cost of Bangladesh’s industrial rise. These rivers do not appear clearly enough in the success story. Neither do the workers’ lungs, rented rooms, overtime hours, food bills, children’s school costs, nor the long journeys between factory, home, and village. This is growth. It produces exports, jobs, foreign exchange, buildings, logistics, ports, roads, banks, and urban consumption. But development has to ask different questions. Can a garment worker live decently on her wage? Can her children breathe clean air and drink safe water? Can the river beside the factory sustain fish, farming, and community life? Can women’s employment be called empowerment if wages remain too low to secure independence? Can a country call itself developed if its global advantage still depends on being cheaper than someone else?
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Bangladesh did not fail because it built a garment industry. That would be the wrong conclusion. The failure is more subtle. The country allowed a growth model built on low wages and environmental sacrifice to be mistaken for development.
Dhaka, Bangladesh. A family stands in floodwater outside a fragile home. Beyond the bridges, factories, export figures, and rising skylines, this is where development must be judged: clean water, secure shelter, dignity, safety, and the right to a future. Bangladesh has changed. But change is not development unless it reaches people here.
The Servant Economy
The same low-wage logic is visible every day in Dhaka. In Gulshan 2, one of the city’s wealthiest neighbourhoods, development has a very particular shape. Cars wait outside apartment blocks. Drivers sit for hours beside the road. Security guards stand at the gates. Cleaners move quietly through stairwells and kitchens. Cooks prepare meals in homes they could never afford to live in. Delivery riders carry food through traffic so others do not have to step outside. This is often described as employment. But it is also dependence.
Much of elite urban life in Dhaka is built on the constant availability of low-paid human service. The comfort of one class depends on the waiting, cleaning, cooking, guarding, carrying, and driving of another. The city’s wealthy not only buy products. They buy distance from heat, dust, traffic, domestic labour, public transport, and the ordinary friction of the city.
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Many of the people who service Gulshan do not live anywhere near its comfort. They come each day from settlements, rented rooms, informal neighbourhoods, and overcrowded parts of the city where life is far less secure. Some come from Korail, one of Dhaka’s largest informal settlements, standing beside some of the most expensive urban land in Bangladesh.
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The contrast is almost too obvious. The people who clean and guard the wealth of Gulshan often live within sight of it, but outside its protection. This is not an accident. It is an economy. There is little incentive to bring this labour fully into the formal system because informality keeps it cheap. A worker without a contract is easier to dismiss. A cleaner without papers is easier to underpay. A guard without bargaining power is easier to replace. A driver waiting twelve hours a day can be treated as a private convenience rather than a worker with rights, limits, family, and fatigue.
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The servant economy survives because it is useful to those who benefit from it. It is also shaped by religion, ethnicity, gender, and social hierarchy. In many households, domestic work is not only a class question. It is a question of who is considered acceptable inside the home, who is considered safe, who is considered socially available for intimate labour, and who has few alternatives. Women from Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, and Indigenous minority communities may be drawn into domestic service partly because they occupy a different place within the moral geography of household labour. Work seen as inappropriate or dishonourable for some women can become the livelihood of others who have less protection from poverty, land loss, discrimination, or migration pressure.
This is where development language becomes evasive. A city can look modern while preserving old forms of dependency. The lift replaces the courtyard. The apartment replaces the family compound. The SUV replaces the rickshaw. The food delivery app replaces the errand boy. But the social structure remains familiar: one group rises by keeping another group available. That is not development in any serious moral sense. Development would mean that ordinary life becomes less dependent on cheap human waiting. It would mean that the city works through fair wages, public systems, rights, transport, housing, and shared responsibility, not through the silent endurance of those who stand at gates, sleep in servants’ quarters, or wait all day beside cars. A society has not developed simply because some people can afford servants.
It has developed when fewer people are compelled to become servants.
When Conflict Is Only the Symptom
The same confusion appears outside the city, in the places where Bangladesh’s growth presses hardest against land, forest, water, and older ways of life. In the northern borderlands, where Indigenous communities live along the edge of forest and farmland, human-elephant conflict is often described as a conservation problem. Elephants come down from the hills. They damage crops. They break houses. They frighten families at night. Villagers defend what little they have. Sometimes elephants die. Sometimes people die.
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But to call this simply a human-elephant conflict is too narrow. The conflict is not the cause. It is the outcome. Elephants move through memory, food, water, cover, and old routes across a landscape. When forests are degraded, movement routes are blocked, water becomes harder to find, and land is converted to agriculture, plantations, roads, settlements, and border infrastructure, elephants do not stop being elephants. They continue to move. But now they move through farms, villages, homesteads, and fear.
People are not the problem either.
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A farmer guarding his rice field at night is not an enemy of conservation. A family afraid of elephants near the house is not anti-nature. An Indigenous community watching its forest disappear is not responsible for the collapse of the landscape around it. People and elephants are being forced into conflict by decisions made through land markets, state policy, extraction, infrastructure, weak governance, and a development model that treats ecological space as vacant until it is converted into economic use. This is why the elder’s sentence matters.
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There has been change. Roads, markets, projects, crops, phones, electricity, schools, NGO programmes, and government schemes have reached many places. But if the forest is weaker, the land is less secure, the river is more damaged, the young are leaving, the language is fading, and the elephants are pushed into villages, then what kind of development has arrived?
Development should not create the conditions for conflict and then treat the conflict as a local management problem. It should ask what has been broken. In the case of elephants, development would mean restoring the conditions that make coexistence possible: forest food, water, cover, safe movement, community protection, fair compensation, local monitoring, land rights, and practical safety for people living closest to risk.
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In the case of Indigenous communities, development would mean something equally basic: the right to remain, the right to language, the right to land, the right to forest knowledge, and the right not to have every change imposed from outside and then described as progress.
Elephants need what all living communities need: food, water, cover, and room to move. When forests are degraded, rivers pressured, and old routes broken by land-use change, conflict follows. This is not simply a wildlife problem. It is what happens when growth consumes the conditions that development should protect.
What Development Really Would Mean
Development would mean more than growth. It would mean that rivers are not sacrificed for export earnings. That forests are not treated as empty land waiting to be used. That farms can sustain families without trapping them in poverty. That work pays enough for dignity. That schools prepare children for the wider world without cutting them away from language and memory. That housing gives the poor security, not just proximity to wealth. Indigenous communities are not asked to celebrate change while losing land, forest, language, and authority over their own future.
Perhaps one of the simplest tests is also the most uncomfortable. When people with money in Dhaka begin to drive their own cars, clean their own houses, and stop measuring status by how many people serve them, Bangladesh will be closer to development. Not because domestic work is shameful. It is not. But because no society should mistake another person’s cheap labour for progress. The elder in the forest-edge village had seen change. He had seen roads, schools, markets, mobile phones, projects, and promises. But he had not seen the kind of development that secures land, protects culture, restores nature, dignifies labour, and allows people to live without being pushed aside by someone else’s idea of progress. That is the question Bangladesh now faces. Not whether it has changed. It has. The question is whether it has developed.
Beyond the growth figures, Bangladesh is lived village by village, field by field, family by family. Explore The Garo Record, ETHNOMAD’s collection of stories, films, and photo essays from the Garo borderlands, where land, language, memory, education, and cultural survival reveal what development really means.
