Bangladesh built a tech park for 100k workers. Now it's a ghost town

Power was missing for 12 days for certain sections of it : https://www.tbsnews.net/bangladesh/energy/bangabandhu-hi-tec...

Across the border in West Bengal, a similar concept in Salt Lake City has done relatively well https://www.flickr.com/photos/debashissaha/8637092181/in/pho...

tbf, Salt Lake is the only place in east india with mncs like IBM, Samsung etc

As long as there is road/rail infrastructure and cheap housing close by, tech workers will flock. The foundation need to be setup first and I guess that's what was missing here.

So much World Bank, European Union, public, or other form of stimulative funding ends up defrauded as a sketchy real estate or construction scheme. It's so universal worldwide. It was supposed to be technology and innovation, but we got a lot of unoccupied concrete.

Bangladesh is a mess. Dhaka is highly polluted. The country faces serious issues like floods. It’s also an officially Islamic nation, a leftover when the British partitioned India on the way out - they gave away big chunks of Indian territory to Islamic extremists to form ethnostates, which became Pakistan and Bangladesh. There’s a lot of corruption. Lots of controversies involving discrimination against various groups based on gender, ethnicity, religion, etc.

I think a combination of all these things just make it unattractive for investment or economic ties with other countries, but it’s also difficult to attract talent. Local talent would prefer to leave. It would take a total reboot of the country, away from its ethnostate roots from the mid 1900s, and with a totally different system of government, for it to turn the corner. But that’s a hard sell to a population that is now overwhelmingly in favor of things the way they are.

I didn't know Bangladesh was supposed to be a tech hub. Fascinating.