Population In Bangladesh Essay

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Bangladesh is a small country of only about 147,570 square kilometers (Population Census, 2009), but its social and cultural life is so diverse that the land has been seen as a paradise by many social scientists. Bangladesh is ranked the eighth most populous country in the world, having 148.5 million people, but occupying only one 3000th part of the world‟s land space (Mabud, 2008). In a regional context, South Asian countries including Bangladesh comprise one quarter of the world‟s population, having 1.5 billion people, and contribute 24 per cent to its annual increase of 80 million people (ibid, 2008).
The density of population in Bangladesh was approximately 720 per square kilometer and 843 per square kilometer in 1991 and 2001 respectively. It had increased to 993 per square kilometer by 2009. The ratio of the sexes is 104.8 males to 100 females (Population Census, 2009). The literacy rate, obtained from the 2001 census, was 46.20 per cent for that part of the population aged seven and above. The percentage of Muslims in the population was 89.6, while the percentages of
Gender and Social exclusion/inclusion Chapter 1
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Hindus, Buddhists and Christians were 9.3, 0.6 and 0.3 respectively (Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics, 2007). Bangladesh is well known for the ethnic homogeneity of its population, because over 98 per cent of the people are Bengalis, predominantly Bangla speaking people. However, there are more than 49 ethnic communities that live all over Bangladesh and constitute roughly 2 per cent of the total population. Since there have been no ethnographic surveys of the indigenous people of Bangladesh, it is very difficult to present an accurate count of their number (Biennial Conference of IPRA, 2006). Therefore, Uddin (2...

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...egorized four types of households: always poor, never poor, ascending households, and descending households. First, the „always poor‟ or „chronic poor‟ group who remained poor through both periods constituted 31 per cent of the sampled households; second, the „never poor‟, who stayed out of poverty through both the periods, represented 25 per cent; third, the „ascending households‟ were the ones who escaped from poverty, and these represented 26 per cent of the households; and finally, the „descending households‟, who descended into poverty, represented 18 per cent of the sample. The difference of eight per cent between the share of the „ascending‟ and the „descending‟ households is the net change in poverty during this period. The study again confirms that mobility among the poor and vulnerable is far greater than the net aggregate poverty changes at national level.

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