Day 6 · Vintage — The old atlas, redrawn: who lives by Bangladesh's rivers and chars

Data

RHD wide-river outlines and char polygons (GIS Data folder, from the RHD GIS shapefiles). BBS Population and Housing Census 2022 GIS layers (villages). The river layer has wide rivers only; small channels, haors and ponds are missing, so distances are upper bounds for river-side living. Chars change every monsoon; the polygons are one snapshot. Straight-line distance.

Methods

1. 7% of Bangladeshis (57.5 million) live within 1 km of a wide river, 18.9% within 500 m and 86.8% within 5 km. Half the country lives within 1.7 km of one.
2. Wide rivers cover 8.0% of Bangladesh (11,635 km² of 145,868). Barishal division is the most river-side: 58% of people within 1 km; Rangpur the least (24%).
3. The most river-side districts: Patuakhali (72%), Pirojpur (69%), Jhalokati (64%), Khulna (64%) and Sunamganj (62%). The farthest from a wide river: Joypurhat (average 5.7 km).
4. 6,719 chars cover 2,303 km²; the median char is only 2.4 ha, but 569 are larger than 1 km² and 19 larger than 10 km². The largest (30 km²) is in Kushtia.
5. Char area is concentrated in the north-west: Kurigram (367 km²), Gaibandha (185 km²) and Lalmonirhat (112 km²).
6. 665 thousand people live in 565 villages whose centre lies on a char — and 6.5% of Bangladeshis (10.8 million) live within 1 km of one. Census villages on moving islands are the hardest to count and to serve.
7. Why it matters: river-side and char households face erosion, floods and the longest routes to services; the map shows where that exposure is concentrated.