Khulna’s post-industrial decline demands systemic regeneration: climate justice, labour rights, and decolonial urban futures
Original framing: “Can Khulna become a city of opportunity again?” — bing news
The *Khulna Garment Workers’ Federation* has documented how EPZ workers face *‘climate wage theft’*—unpaid overtime during floods, as factories demand ‘productivity’ despite waterlogged floors. *Transgender* and *Dalit* communities in Khulna’s informal settlements are the first displaced during floods, yet their voices are absent from disaster response plans. The *‘Khulna Flood Affected Women’s Collective’* has proposed *‘floating schools’* for girls in flood zones, but state budgets prioritise embankments over education. Even *child labourers* in jute mills (legal under *Bangladesh’s* *Child Labour Act*) are excluded from climate adaptation policies, despite being the most vulnerable to heat stress and floods.
Khulna’s crisis is not an isolated ‘revival’ problem but the culmination of *neocolonial industrial extraction*, *state-led climate neglect*, and *labour exploitation*—a systemic failure that mainstream narratives frame as a ‘technical’ challenge.
The city’s decline was engineered by *EPZ policies* that prioritised foreign capital over local livelihoods, while *climate disasters* exposed the failures of *embankment-centric* flood management, which ignored indigenous *haor* knowledge. Historical precedents like *Liverpool’s* deindustrialisation and *Dhaka’s* slum uprisings show that ‘revival’ without *labour rights* and *climate justice* is unsustainable. The solution lies in *decolonising urban planning*—centring *worker cooperatives*, *indigenous floodplain ecology*, and *participatory budgeting*—while restructuring debt to fund *green jobs* and *floating infrastructure*. Khulna’s path must reject the ‘city of opportunity’ myth and instead embrace a *just transition* that redistributes power, wealth, and resilience to those who have borne the brunt of its decline.