Public Lives, Private Water: Female Ready-Made Garment Factory Workers in Peri-Urban Bangladesh

Abstract

In Dhaka city and its fringe peri-urban sprawls water for domestic use is an increasingly contested commodity. The location of our research, Gazipur district, bordering the growing city of Dhaka, is the heartland of Bangladesh’s Ready Made Garments (RMG) industry, which has spread unplanned in former wetlands and agrarian belts. However, unlike Dhaka, the almost fully industrialized peri-urban areas bordering the city, like many other such areas globally, function in an institutional vacuum. There are no formal institutional arrangements for water supply or sanitation. In the absence of regulations for mining groundwater for industrial use and weakly enforced norms for effluent discharge, the expansion of the RMG industry and other industries has had a disproportionate environmental impact. In this complex and challenging context, we apply a political economy lens to draw attention to the paradoxical situation of the increasingly “public” lives of poor Bangladeshi women working in large numbers in the RMG industry in situations of increasingly “private” and appropriated water sources in this institutionally liminal peri-urban space. Our findings show that poorly paid work for women in Bangladesh’s RMG industry does not translate to women’s empowerment because, among others, a persisting masculinity and the lack of reliable, appropriate and affordable WASH services make women’s domestic water work responsibilities obligatory and onerous.