Developing small and medium-sized towns is the answer
Photo: Courtesy
I visited more than a dozen small and medium sized towns in Bangladesh during the last two months to get a good understanding about our urbanisation trends. Incomparable with Dhaka and Chattogram cities, these towns have total populations varying between an estimated 30,000 and 500,000. The medium-sized urban centres, which include the district towns and some upazila centres, have reasonably good infrastructure and services, although the situation is not equally good in all the small urban centres. In the municipal and city corporations, which are urban local governments, through financing by both the government and bilateral and multilateral funding agencies like World Bank and Asian Development Bank, the conditions of roads, drains, footpaths and street lights, and the quality of piped water supplies, have improved significantly in the past two decades. The private sector also invested in state-of-the-art comme