ABSTRACT
Rural Bangladesh is confronted by overwhelming problems of poverty, unemployment, illiteracy, malnutrition, and high fertility, mortality and population growth rates. This chapter analyzes the successes and failures in achieving popular participation at the grassroots level of a few selected rural development programs in Bangladesh. Rural development programs have been undertaken in one form or another for many years in areas which constitute the state of Bangladesh. Near the end of British rule of the Indian subcontinent, a few individuals, specifically civil servants belonging to the Indian Civil Service, took keen interest in promoting the idea of rural development. Village Agricultural Industrial Development. After the creation of Pakistan in 1947, it took seven years before an organized rural development program, known as Village Agricultural Industrial Development, was instituted. The Comilla Academy of Rural Development in mid-1960s provided a strategy, on the basis of experimental pilot activities in rural development, conducted by the academy in the Comllla Kotwail thana.
