Planning and Development Research

1.1 Background of the study Bangladesh is an agro-based country. Eighty percent of its population lives in rural area and most of them dependent on agriculture, directly or indirectly. Their way of residing is compact or disperses in context of rural settlement. Most of the people in the villages are living in the joint family. Only a little number of them is living as single family. In the rural area, the vacant lands are being captured day after day by the residential land uses for the newly crated families. Therefore, the rural settlements are increasing day after day. The villagers are eager to achieve the urban facilities for their agriculture productivity, comfortable life and home based recreation. As a result, they are working heard and soul. Therefore, development depends on various factors and facilities. One of the important factors of such namely urban opportunities is the living and settlement pattern of the villagers. Technology is the most important factor for t

INTRODUCTION BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY Bangladesh , with an agrarian socio-economic base, is characterized primarily by a rural settlement structure. The word “rural” area is comes from the Latin word “Ruralisrus” which is equivalent with English word “the country”. Similarly the word “settlement” comes from the English word “sett” meaning “Seat” or “setlan”. [1] Expansion of rural settlement means human behaviours that are created as a physical environment on rural area. Physical environment can be treated as settlement form and pattern or chronological area coverage. About 76.61 percent people live in rural Bangladesh . [2] The present vegetation cover of the country and the landscape indicate several millennia of human activity. The original vegetation cover has been lost and the basic landscape has been changed considerably by levelling, tracing of land and also irrigation practices, and they have derived their characters from the pattern of human settlements developm