Population
133,376,684 (July 2002 est.),Age Structure0-14 years: 33.8% (male 23,069,242; female 21,995,457)
15-64 years: 62.8% (male 42,924,778; female 40,873,077)
65 years and over: 3.4% (male 2,444,314; female 2,069,816) (2002 est.)

Ethnic Groups
98% Bengali , 2% non-Bengali Muslims.Main tribal groups Chakmas, Marmas, Tipperas, and Mros, living primarily in Chittagong Hills Tracts.

Languages
Bangla (official language); English widely used by educated elite. Arabic used in many Muslim homes. Various tribal languages. Religion: In 1988 nearly 83 percent Muslim, 16 percent Hindu, less than 1 percent Buddhist, Christian, and tribal religions.

Education
Schools based on British system: five years primary, five years lower secondary, and two years higher secondary. Higher education includes 758 general colleges, 7 universities, and 50 professional colleges. Traditional emphasis on arts and humanities. Numerous religious-affiliated primary schools.Befinition: age 15 and over can read and write.
Literacy rate in total population 56%. Male: 63%,Female: 49% (2000 est.).

Health:
During the nineties, considerable progress has been achieved in Bangladesh in the fields of Health and Family Welfare. Life expectancy aveange for total population is 60.92 years.female: 60.74 years , Male: 61.08 years(2002 est.). Major health hazards infectious and parasitic diseases, poor nutrition, and inadequate sanitation.

Rural Society

The basic social unit in a village is the family (paribar or gushti), generally consisting of a complete or incomplete patrilineally extended household (chula) and residing in a homestead (bari). The individual nuclear family often is submerged in the larger unit and might be known as the house (ghar).

Above the bari level, patrilineal kin ties are linked into sequentially larger groups based on real, fictional, or assumed relationships.

A significant unit larger than that of close kin is the voluntary religious and mutual benefit association known as the "the society" (samaj or millat). Among the functions of a samaj might be the maintenance of a mosque and support of a mullah. An informal council of samaj elders (matabdars or sardars) settles village disputes. Factional competition between the matabdars is a major dynamic of social and political interaction.

Groups of homes in a village are called paras, and each para has its own name. Several paras constitute a mauza, the basic revenue and census survey unit. The traditional character of rural villages was changing in the latter half of the twentieth century with the addition of brick structures of one or more stories scattered among the more common thatched bamboo huts.

Although farming has traditionally ranked among the most desirable occupations, villagers in the 1980s began to encourage their children to leave the increasingly overcrowded countryside to seek more secure employment in the towns.
Traditional sources of prestige, such as landholding, distinguished lineage, and religious piety were beginning to be replaced by modern education, higher income, and steadier work. These changes, however, did not prevent rural poverty from increasing greatly.

Urban Society

Bangladesh is more or less an agro-based economy. The core of the economic cycle of this country is revolving around the rural areas. As a result urbanization of Bangladesh is at its primitive level.
But at the start of the 21st century. Urbanization of this nation is growing at a very high speed due to the introduction of a new economic reality.

about 18 percent of the population lived in urban areas, most of which were villages or trade centers in rural areas. Urban centers grew in number and population during the 1980s as a result of an administrative decentralization program that featured the creation of subdistricts. In appearance these small urban areas were generally shabby.

Most of the urban population merely congregated in ramshackle structures with poor sanitation and an almost total lack of modern amenities. Towns were populated mostly by government functionaries, merchants, and other business personnel. Most dwellings contained nuclear families and some extended family lodgers. A few households or a neighborhood would constitute a para, which might develop some cohesiveness but would have no formal leadership structure. With the exception of a small number of transients, most town populations consisted of permanent inhabitants who maintained connections with their ancestral villages through property or family ties. Most towns had social and sporting clubs and libraries. Unlike in the rural areas, kinship ties among the town population were limited and fragile.

Civil society
initiatives are deeply rooted in Bangladesh, with NGOs—Non-Governmental Organizations—reaching nearly 78% of the country's villages. Community initiatives that mobilize local people in economic and self-help activities are critical for progress in rural areas.

Civil society
Civil society is among the strongest in all of South Asia in Bangladesh.
1. After liberation, a climate of chaos and famine existed in the country. As a result, NGOs became major, perhaps dominant actors in national development, making Bangladesh home to some of the largest NGOs in the world.

2. It is estimated that there are 19,000 NGOs in Bangladesh, covering over 78% of the villages and 24 million people in the country (approximately one-fifth of the population.)

3. As elsewhere in South Asia, community-based people's organizations are strongly rooted in Bangladesh.

4. Bangladesh has 20,000 local people's groups that receive local and central government financial support, as well as many more that do not.

5. Many community organizations engage in traditional self-help economic activities.

Influential NGOs

1. BRAC—Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee, is an NGO with deep roots in Bangladesh society. It began as a relief and rehabilitation effort in February 1972.

2. BRAC is widely regarded as the pioneer in "scaling up"—in going beyond the traditional "pilot projects" of NGOs to handle large scale national projects.

3. Proshika—Proshika is a nationwide NGO that has been actively engaged in formal and non-formal education and skills training to the rural poor.

Microcredit
Bangladesh is the birthplace of the micro-credit movement, spearheaded by Prof. Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank.

Grameen has become an internationally reputed bank for the poor, whose techniques have been duplicated around the world.

Grameen is lauded for its effort to provide credit in particular to poor women, whose traditional responsibility for all areas of social development make them key players in the struggle to eliminate poverty.

Women's Role in Society

the status of women in Bangladesh remained considerably inferior to that of men. Women, in custom and practice, remained subordinate to men in almost all aspects of their lives; greater autonomy was the privilege of the rich or the necessity of the very poor.

Most women's lives remained centered on their traditional roles, and they had limited access to markets, productive services, education, health care, and local government. This lack of opportunities contributed to high fertility patterns, which diminished family well-being, contributed to the malnourishment and generally poor health of children, and frustrated educational and other national development goals. In fact, acute poverty at the margin appeared to be hitting hardest at women. As long as women's access to health care, education, and training remained limited, prospects for improved productivity among the female population remained poor.

The majority of rural women, perhaps 70 percent, were in small cultivator, tenant, and landless households; many worked as laborers part time or seasonally, usually in post-harvest activities, and received payment in kind or in meager cash wages. Another 20 percent, mostly in poor landless households, depended on casual labor, gleaning, begging, and other irregular sources of income; typically, their income was essential to household survival. The remaining 10 percent of women were in households mainly in the professional, trading, or large-scale landowning categories, and they usually did not work outside the home.

The economic contribution of women was substantial but largely unacknowledged. Women in rural areas were responsible for most of the post-harvest work, which was done in the chula, and for keeping livestock, poultry, and small gardens. Women in cities relied on domestic and traditional jobs, but in the 1980s they increasingly worked in manufacturing jobs, especially in the readymade garment industry .

Those with more education worked in government, health care, and teaching, but their numbers remained very small. Continuing high rates of population growth and the declining availability of work based in the chula meant that more women sought employment outside the home. Accordingly, the female labor force participation rate doubled between 1974 and 1984, when it reached nearly 8 percent. Female wage rates are low, typically ranging between 20 and 30 percent of male wage rates.

Social Classes and Stratification

Social class distinctions are mostly functional, however, and there was considerable mobility among classes. Even the structure of the Hindu caste system in Bangladesh was relatively loose because most Hindus belonged to the lower castes.

egalitarian principles of Islam were the basis of social organization.Even the low-caste jolhas (weavers) had improved their social standing since 1971. Although several hierarchically arranged groups--such as the syeds (noble born) and the sheikhs, or shaykhs (also noble born)--were noticeable in Bangladesh Muslim society, there were no impenetrable hereditary social distinctions. Rather, fairly permeable classes based on wealth and political influence existed both in the cities and in the villages.

Traditional Muslim class distinctions had little importance in Bangladesh. The proscription against marriage between individuals of high-born and low-born families, once an indicator of the social gap between the two groups, had long ago disappeared; most matrimonial alliances were based on wealth and power and not on the ties of family distinction. Also, many so-called upper class families, because of their traditional use of the Urdu language, had become alienated in independent Bangladesh.

Although Hindu society is formally stratified into caste categories, caste did not figure prominently in the Bangladeshi Hindu community. About 75 percent of the Hindus in Bangladesh belonged to the lower castes, notably namasudras (lesser cultivators), and the remainder belonged primarily to outcaste or untouchable groups. Some members of higher castes belonged to the middle or professional class, but there was no Hindu upper class. With the increasing participation of the Hindus in nontraditional professional mobility, the castes were able to interact in wider political and socioeconomic arenas, which caused some erosion of caste consciousness. Although there is no mobility between Hindu castes, caste distinctions did not play as important a role in Bangladesh as in they did in the Hindu-dominated Indian state of West Bengal. Bangladeshi Hindus seemed to have become part of the mainstream culture without surrendering their religious and cultural distinctions.