ABSTRACT
Bangladesh is at the tail end of the world’s second largest river system. It is the world’s largest and wettest and, over most of the year, it is also an arid delta. It is a unique ecosystem. It is a land of very fertile soil with numerous rivers and abundant groundwater. It once had very rich fauna and flora and, even now, it is quite rich in this respect. Until the industrial revolution, it was one of the world’s most prosperous regions, which attracted the British trading East India Company to India (Spear, 1978). Currently, it is one of the poorest and is in a desperate state for survival, for which the management of the environment is crucial and extremely challenging, even among all the countries of the GBM basin.
