Endangered growth

The news on Priya's phone screen felt like a ghost. It was a report of numbers: poverty at nearly 28 percent, jobless growth. These figures seemed as remote from her life in the Korail slum as the glass towers of Gulshan. She had once believed in the "development miracle" of Bangladesh, leaving her village in the hope of joining it. Now it seemed that the miracle was a party for a select few, and she was left outside, looking in.

A university graduate in computer science, Priya embodied the report's starkest finding: jobless growth. Her formal education, the supposed golden ticket, had led to a dead end. The new jobs were for a specialised workforce speaking a language of algorithms she had to master alone. News anchors spoke of AI and automation. A UN report warned their benefits would be concentrated in the hands of a privileged few. A Morgan Stanley prediction of $3 trillion in AI investment sounded to her like a death knell for the dreams of women needing work, not abstract miracles.

She scrolled further. Extreme poverty had risen to 9.35 percent. This ghost was a truth she already knew. Her mother had toiled in the fields. Her sister, a garment worker, had lost her job to a machine. The report called it a "gender gap" and a "flawed poverty reduction model". Priya saw a system devaluing the labour of women who formed the backbone of the RMG sector while replacing them with machines. The city that once promised opportunity now felt like a cold engine, and she was a cog it no longer needed.

Priya found a desperate new purpose in the "gig economy". Experts described a digital ecosystem offering "flexible" work. It sounded like a lifeline. In a cheap internet café, she applied for data entry, transcription and coding tasks, but faced a wall of rejection. She was competing not just with a global workforce but with AI models doing the same tasks faster and cheaper. She recalled a report stating AI talent in the region was small and that women would be disproportionately affected. Her sister's factory job had been taken by a sewing automaton; now her own degree had become just as worthless, replaced by a ghost in a machine.

The stark truth was clear: "if it is not engendered, then it is endangered". The very systems promising progress were sidelining women like Priya. Reports from the World Bank and the ILO noted the potential of online gig work to offer flexibility but also documented its vulnerabilities.

Female gig workers, often doing lower-paid tasks in domestic or beauty services, faced unpredictable wages, no social security and higher rates of harassment. The automation that had displaced her sister from the factory floor now threatened Priya's efforts to find a foothold in the digital world. These findings were not just about a "gender gap". They were a warning that as Bangladesh's economy evolved, the very women who had powered its growth were being left behind, their futures imperilled by a technological shift they had no role in shaping.

Walking through the chaotic streets of Farmgate, Priya saw her failure reflected in its neon. She spotted Nabil, a former student leader who had fought against the job quota system for a merit-based future. He walked with a weary slump. "They made promises," he told her, his voice heavy with disillusion. "It was just to quiet us. No real commitment. The gap is wider than ever."

Priya realised the ghost in the machine was not only a number or a robotic arm; it was the growing distance between her and Nabil, between their shared dreams and a political reality with no room for them. She thought of a UNICEF report she had skimmed, about AI's potential to "widen existing inequalities". It was not a warning but a prophecy, and she was living it.

The writer is coordinator of Ella Alliance and founder of Ella Pad