‘We cannot change the river, and we cannot stop moving’
Originally published on Global Voices
Boats and people on the Turag River, Dhaka, Bangladesh. Image via Flickr by Wonderlane. CC BY 2.0.
For nomadic Bede families on the Jamuna River in central Bangladesh, moving is a routine part of life. A study published in May 2026 in the journal Cambridge Prisms: Global Mental Health looked at three nomadic settlements in Tangail district of central Bangladesh: Jugiyar Char, Palima and Char Nikrail. It found that these families move several times a year, driven by seasonal floods and erosion, as well as searches for paying audiences. However, climate change and increasingly unpredictable river conditions are forcing these communities to land.
The researchers conducted a micro-case study through 12 interviews and one focus group during Bangladesh’s 2025 monsoon season (June through October). It describes displacement as an ongoing condition, not a single event. “We cannot change the river, and we cannot stop moving,” one sardar, or community leader, told them.
A second study, published online in August 2026 in Dhaka University’s Social Science Review, highlights the dire environmental exposure and disaster vulnerabilities of Bede settlements in Munshiganj, calling for organized cooperation between government agencies and relief NGOs.
Who are the Bede?
The Bede are a traditionally mobile community that has lived and worked on Bangladesh’s rivers for generations. They have long been marginalized in Bangladeshi society, and many make a living as snake charmers, folk healers, sellers of herbal medicine and amulets, and street performers.
Historical accounts often trace the community’s roots to 1638, when groups arrived in Dhaka alongside the exiled king of Myanmar’s northwestern coastal region (then Arakan). It is difficult to get an accurate count of how many Bede exist in Bangladesh today. Climate Watch, a Bangladeshi news site, has cited figures ranging from about 75,000, from the Department of Social Services, to roughly 800,000.
Families traditionally travel in boat groups led by a sardar (leader). When they stop on land, they often camp on riverbanks or on chars, the sandbars that big rivers build up and wash away.
This is not ordinary migration. Researchers from the study published in Cambridge Prisms: Global Mental Health contrast it with refugees who flee a single event: Bede families are almost always on the move, which makes them hard to reach for clinics, schools, and civil registers that assume a fixed address.
Inland migration
Today, many of these families are being forced to move away from their river roots and are settling on land.
Community members share that climate change has forced many to give up on the river as worsening floods, erosion, and storms make their former settlements uninhabitable. They also said some canals and channels are drying up, making life on the water impossible in some areas.
In terms of income, one sardar explained that families stay about a month in one place and leave when audiences stop coming. In Munshiganj, respondents told the Dhaka University team that demand for traditional work is falling, that stigma pushes people away from it, and that a recent ban on snake-catching has cost them income. About 88 percent said they did not want their children to follow the traditional trades.
Concerning work on land, in 2019, leaders of the Bede settlement in Savar, near Dhaka, one of the country’s largest, told a police officer that poverty and dying rivers meant families could no longer sail to other areas, and that interest in snake-charming and other old trades was fading.
To expand Bede people’s economic opportunities, the Uttaran Foundation, a local NGO, has trained about 200 young Bede women, who now work in garment factories. While both aforementioned studies are hyper-local and may not apply to all settlements, they reflect a tension between modern life, environmental realities, and traditions.
Services built for people who stay put
The Dhaka University study notes that many Bede families are landless and lack official citizenship documents, which limits their access to relief and disaster programs.
Part of the problem is simple logistics. In Bangladesh, official papers are tied to a fixed address, and many Bede families don’t have one. The Red Cross Red Crescent Magazine noted in 2023 that because the Bede usually live in temporary settlements and “don’t have permanent addresses,” getting the ID cards and other documents needed for basic services becomes impossible. The gap runs deeper than paperwork, though. Legal researcher Tamanna Tabassum Kabir wrote in the Indraprastha Law Review in 2020 that the Bede are not listed as an ethnic group in the national census, and that they “have not been officially recognized as citizens” even though they have lived in Bangladesh for centuries.
Kabir writes that Bede people could not enroll as voters until 2008. That mattered beyond the ballot box. According to a Canadian immigration board report, the government issued national ID cards using data collected for voter registration, so getting on the voter list was a way into other documents. The door hasn’t fully opened, though. In 2019, Philip Gain reported in The Daily Star, a local news outlet, that many Bede households own no land or house where they could be registered as voters.
A 2026 report by Bangladesh’s statistics bureau and the UN’s Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) found that children from smaller ethnic communities, and from families that have recently moved, are among the least likely to have their births registered.
United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) described what that looks like in Aftabnagar, in eastern Dhaka, during the 2023 Human Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination campaign. The girls in the local Bede community had no birth certificates, so they could not be registered in the usual way. Kamrun Nahar, a vaccinator appointed by the Dhaka North City Corporation, spent many hours winning over the community leader and families, and visited at night, when everyone was home. The girls were eventually enlisted by hand. All 24 girls in the community received the vaccine in a single day, UNICEF reported in April 2024.
Some schools have tried to follow the families. An Ashoka profile of fellow A.K.M. Maksud describes six boat schools that traveled with Bede fleets near Dhaka, plus a fixed school in Aminbazar, run through his non-profit organization, Grambangla Unnayan Committee.
Adapting, not only enduring
The Cambridge study also documents how families manage the move. They negotiate with landowners and local youth before they settle, lean on a reputation built on earlier visits, and share food, money, and care within the group. Asked what would help improve their lives, participants named modest things: a small plot to live on, some help with work, medicine, and schools. The authors recommend mobile, community-based support designed with community leaders, not clinic-only models.
A 55-year-old Bede woman interviewed for the Munshiganj study said the younger generation no longer wants to live on boats and hopes education will help remove the stigma of being Bede.
Field observations from riverbank settlements in Savar, near Dhaka, highlight how these practical struggles play out. “Our ancestors lived and died on boats, but the rivers are no longer what they used to be,” observed Alamgir Sardar, a community leader in the area. “Without a permanent address on land, our children cannot get birth certificates or regular schooling. Moving to land is no longer a choice for us, as it is a matter of survival.”
For parents, the transition is also driven by hopes of breaking historical stigma. “I never went to school because we were always moving from one river ghāt to another,” shared Rahela Begum, a mother living in a temporary land settlement in Savar. “I want my children to study and live with dignity on land so they do not have to face the disrespect we experienced.”