Root Causes and Consequences of Extreme Poverty in Northern Bangladesh

Abstract

Poverty has always become major concern due to multifarious reasons in the Northern part of Bangladesh from the very earlier years of independent Bengal. The concoction of this study is to find out the root causes and consequence of extreme poverty in Northern Bangladesh. Following purposive sampling a survey is conducted at 8 villages of Kurigram district from October  December 2019. In addition, the researcher distributed a total of 106 surveys to respondents for analyzing and interpreting target population. The study revealed that the most vulnerable groups in the selected area were agricultural wage laborer’s, landless and marginal farmers, children, women and aged people while food shortages, livelihood patterns, lack of industry, extreme  unemployment and overall dependency associated with poverty scales and such states create more penetration on these community. The study concluded that hazardous events, Monga situation, resource scarcity, poor socio-economic structure and underdeveloped infrastructure solely deployed extreme poverty in the study region. Lastly, it is also designed to suggest how to reduce the extreme poverty following various poverty reduction programs by NGOs and government of Bangladesh using measurement scales towards standard livelihood in northern region.