The human psyche is wired for justice—this is not metaphor but science. When injustice accumulates beyond a threshold, it does not dissipate; it detonates. That is what happened in July 2024. For a fleeting moment in those days, it seemed as if the country might finally locate its collective self. But rage, on its own, cannot rebuild; it merely exposes the wound. And here we stand again—precariously close to square one.
As we move forward, we must confront the wrong in its totality. Yet while the horror was visceral, the remedy cannot be. The challenge before us is not emotional. It is structural.
Let me state the argument plainly: Hasinomics did not collapse because it was authoritarian; it collapsed because it destroyed the engines of sustainable development. It hollowed out the structural drivers of productivity, mobility, and resilience. By 2024, these fractures converged into a complete blockade on social mobility, ultimately triggering the political explosion we witnessed.
Bangladesh's production base remained fundamentally weak because both of the main sectors, agriculture and RMG, were stuck in a low-productivity equilibrium. Agriculture, still employing nearly 40 percent of the labour force, consistently grew at a slower pace than inflation. For over a decade, rural incomes declined in real terms even as GDP increased. When a sector that employs the majority of labour produces less output per worker, transformation becomes mathematically impossible.
What makes this more tragic is what never occurred. Peer economies built the basic infrastructure of modern agriculture: cold-chains, storage ecosystems, agro-processing hubs, salinity-resistant seeds, and digital commodity platforms. Bangladesh built none of these at a meaningful scale. Capital that should have funded this transition was diverted into choreographed megaprojects and loan defaults.
The RMG sector followed identical logic. Comparable economies such as Vietnam boosted their exports by shifting into higher-value textiles, synthetics, technical fabrics, automated processes, and design-rich manufacturing. Bangladesh remained locked in low-value stitching lines. Data suggest Vietnam's textile and apparel exports are approaching $44 billion, a growth model predicated on value-addition and upgrading, not bare labour advantage.
Meanwhile, Bangladesh's labour productivity stagnated because capital never returned to the factory floor. Politically connected conglomerates understood that higher returns lay in loan-capture, land speculation, and public contracts rather than genuine industrial upgrading. By 2024, this diversion had produced a Tk 7.56 lakh crore distressed-asset crater—capital that should have financed innovation and diversification.
The clearest indicator of this extraction-driven stagnation lies in wages. In 2024, real wages fell across the board: two percent for low-skilled workers, 0.5 percent for high-skilled. Despite rising exports, wages declined because productivity did not rise. The economy generated two kinds of jobs: low-skill sewing-line roles or high-skill managerial positions often filled by foreign-educated elites. Domestic graduates were trapped in the "missing middle": overeducated for factories, underprepared for elite roles, and excluded by insider networks. That missing middle is not a theoretical abstraction; it is the very real absence of the technicians, supervisors, digital operators, and process controllers that every modern industrial economy needs to thrive.
By 2024, less than one percent of depositors, i.e. 1,13,586 accounts controlled 43.35 percent of all bank deposits with at least Tk 1 crore in the accounts. This was no statistical quirk; it was the political settlement in full display. The economy was engineered to pool capital at the top, not to circulate it through SMEs, innovators, or workers. SMEs were not starved by accident, but by design.
This top-heavy economy left bottom-of-the-pyramid communities exposed to climate change. Climate inequality hardened into a permanent economic trap for many: the poor lived directly in the path of environmental destruction while the wealthy insulated themselves with generators, air filtration and offshore accounts.
In the coastal belt, salinity and cyclones erased livelihoods. In the riverine north, erosion repeatedly destroyed land, savings, and the possibility of intergenerational progress. Instead of channelling resources into adaptation—embankments, drainage, green infrastructure, community shelters—national wealth continued flowing upwards through the perfected extraction mechanism.
The extraction machine operated at peak efficiency. First, politically connected groups received enormous loans from state and private banks, often without meaningful collateral or even a door to hang their signboard above. Second, those loans were systematically defaulted, creating a ballooning distressed-asset hole. Third, when banks began to falter, the state intervened with taxpayer funds to recapitalise them—turning private theft into public liability. Fourth, the same networks siphoned money abroad—an estimated $16 billion annually—draining the country of the investment capital needed for industrial upgrading. Fifth, inflated megaprojects and politically allocated contracts provided an additional rent pipeline. Finally, the liquidity that remained inside the country pooled at the very top. This was not mismanagement—it was a weaponised political economy brutally calibrated for extraction.
But we must stop attributing novelty to Hasinomics. Its genius lay in perfecting an extractive machinery with roots traceable to colonial administration—centralised, coercive, and designed to drain. Just because the regime has fallen, it does not follow that the machine has been destroyed.
A sustainable development strategy must begin with a simple and non-negotiable principle: growth must be productive, inclusive, and resilient. That means diversifying beyond low-value sectors, building middle-skill industries, investing in community-level climate adaptation, and rewiring finance so that capital circulates through the real economy rather than escaping it.
The window of Bangladesh's demographic dividend closes by the mid-2030s. Time is not on our side. If we hesitate, the system will revert. We would be another generation that wasted a generational opportunity.
Saba El Kabir is a development practitioner and founder of Cultivera Limited. He can be reached at [email protected].
Views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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