Rangpur

Rangpur's name comes from a colonial mistake that tells the city's whole story. The British grew indigo here — rongo in Bengali — and named the district after the crop they were extracting. When synthetic dyes killed indigo in the 1890s, the region collapsed. When independence came in 1971, British American Tobacco planted a new cash crop in the same fertile Teesta River soil. Rangpur traded one extractive monoculture for another.

The tobacco economy follows the same biological pattern as the indigo economy before it: the region serves as a source habitat, producing raw material that flows to processing centres elsewhere, while the population that grows it remains among Bangladesh's poorest. Rangpur Division recorded a 47.2% poverty rate in 2016 — the highest of any division in Bangladesh. Over ten million households nationally depend on tobacco cultivation for their livelihoods, with Rangpur as the epicentre. The tobacco plant thrives in the alluvial soil deposited by the Teesta's annual floods: exactly the conditions that made indigo profitable two centuries earlier.

The infrastructure that broke the flood cycle also deepened the agricultural lock-in. The Teesta Barrage, completed in 1998 after two decades of construction, is Bangladesh's largest irrigation project, covering seven districts. It ended the annual flooding that had prevented industrial development. But instead of enabling diversification, the controlled water supply made year-round tobacco cultivation possible. The barrage engineered a niche — then tobacco filled it.

The surprise is what happened next. Between 2016 and 2022, Rangpur's poverty rate nearly halved — from 47.2% to 24.8%. The division lost its status as Bangladesh's poorest to Barishal. This was not led by industrial transformation. Food processing, ceramics, and light engineering emerged, but Rangpur remains nowhere near the garment manufacturing centres of Dhaka and Chittagong that generate 81% of Bangladesh's export revenue. The poverty reduction came through agricultural intensification, remittance flows, and micro-enterprise growth — a distributed response rather than a centralised industrial strategy.

The environmental cost of the tobacco model is accumulating. Tobacco curing requires wood fuel, driving deforestation across the division's sub-districts. The crop depletes soil nutrients faster than natural recovery cycles can replace them. Water-intensive cultivation strains the Teesta system already threatened by upstream Indian diversions — a geopolitical vulnerability that compounds the ecological one.

Rangpur is a case study in what ecologists call a shifting baseline. Each generation inherits a slightly degraded version of the previous generation's resource base and accepts it as normal. Indigo exhausted the colonial economy. Tobacco is exhausting the post-colonial one. The Teesta, which created the fertility that made both crops possible, runs lower each decade.