Gazipur
Bangladesh's $50B garment industry runs through this cluster north of Dhaka — 52% of national capacity, 55% female workforce, weaver-ant economics where each factory is dispensable but the colony is irreplaceable.
Bangladesh's $50-billion garment export industry runs through Gazipur. Just north of Dhaka, this city of 2.7 million anchors the largest spinning and dyeing cluster in the country, housing factories for Ha-meem Group, DBL Group, and Viyellatex — names that rarely appear on clothing labels but stitch the garments hanging in every Western retailer.
The numbers define the relationship: Bangladesh is the world's second-largest garment exporter, 55% of its 5 million garment workers are women drawn from rural areas, and the Dhaka region — of which Gazipur is the industrial core — holds over 52% of national manufacturing capacity. The city exists because rural labour migrates to where the sewing machines are, a source-sink dynamic that has transformed a once-agricultural area into a continuous industrial zone.
55% of Bangladesh's 5 million garment workers are women drawn from rural villages — Gazipur is where that migration lands.
The vulnerability is water. Gazipur's dyeing and finishing operations consume enormous volumes, and the city faces acute water stress during dry seasons. Early movers like Viyellatex and DBL have installed zero-liquid-discharge plants — an adaptation that functions as a competitive moat, since newer entrants must either match the environmental investment or face regulatory exclusion from European buyers demanding supply chain compliance.
This is the weaver ant pattern: thousands of individual units performing identical specialised tasks, each dispensable, collectively irreplaceable. No single Gazipur factory matters to the global supply chain, but the cluster as a whole is the mechanism that keeps fast fashion priced below what any developed-country factory could match. The garment sector contributes over 80% of Bangladesh's export earnings, making the entire national economy dependent on this single industrial organism.
Gazipur's expansion continues not because conditions are excellent but because the cluster effect makes leaving more expensive than staying. Each new factory deepens the labour pool, the supplier network, and the logistics infrastructure — a positive feedback loop that concentrates risk and reward in the same square miles of floodplain.