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Dhaka is the capital and largest city of Bangladesh, the seat of its government, its financial centre and its cultural heart. It stands on the northern bank of the Buriganga River in the centre of the country, and it is administered as two separate city corporations — Dhaka North and Dhaka South — which together held just over 10.3 million people at the 2022 census. Counted as a whole urban agglomeration, the capital region is far bigger: the United Nations' World Urbanization Prospects 2025 estimates 36.6 million residents, making Dhaka the second-largest city on earth and, on current projections, the largest by 2050.
Few cities carry so many layers in so small an area. Dhaka has been a Mughal provincial capital, a muslin-trading port known across the world, a declining colonial town, the capital of East Pakistan and, since 1971, the capital of an independent nation. That history is still legible in the lanes of Old Dhaka, in Mughal and colonial monuments, and in institutions such as the University of Dhaka. It is equally a city under strain: its air is among the most polluted of any capital, its traffic among the slowest, and its two city corporations are currently run by appointed administrators rather than elected mayors. This profile sets out the documented record — the history, geography, people, economy and challenges of Bangladesh's capital.
The origin of the name "Dhaka" is not settled. One tradition derives it from the Dhakeshwari temple, the city's oldest Hindu shrine; another links it to the dhak tree, once common in the area. Both are traditions rather than documented etymology, and honest accounts present them as such.
A settlement existed on the Buriganga long before the Mughals, but Dhaka's urban history begins in earnest in the early seventeenth century. Islam Khan Chishti, appointed subahdar (governor) of Bengal in 1608, campaigned against the Bara Bhuiyan chiefs who controlled the delta and, in 1610, transferred the provincial capital from Rajmahal to Dhaka, renaming it Jahangirnagar after the Emperor Jahangir. (Some accounts date the capital's founding to 1608, the year of Islam Khan's appointment; historians generally treat 1610, the year of the transfer itself, as the better-supported date.) Under Mughal rule the city flourished as a river port and as the centre of Bengal's famed muslin trade, drawing Armenian, Portuguese, Dutch, French and English merchants.
The city's fortunes turned with the empire. The capital moved back to Rajmahal in 1639, returned around 1659–1660, and in 1717 Murshid Quli Khan shifted it to Murshidabad, beginning a long decline. Dhaka passed to the British East India Company with the grant of the Diwani in 1765 and settled into the role of a district town, though it gained a municipality in 1864 and briefly recovered capital status as the seat of the short-lived province of East Bengal and Assam (1905–1912). In 1947 it became the capital of East Pakistan, and on 16 December 1971 the capital of independent Bangladesh. One date the older accounts routinely get wrong: the official spelling of the city's name was changed from "Dacca" to "Dhaka" in 1983, not at independence.
Dhaka occupies a low, flat stretch of the Bengal delta, only a few metres above sea level, hemmed in by rivers: the Buriganga to the south, the Turag to the west and north-west, the Balu to the east and the Tongi Khal to the north. The two city corporations together cover roughly 306 square kilometres — about 196 square kilometres for Dhaka North and about 109 for Dhaka South after the south's expansion in 2017. Beyond the corporation boundaries, the built-up area spills continuously into Gazipur, Narayanganj, Keraniganj and Savar, which is why metropolitan population figures so far exceed the census count for the corporations themselves.
The climate is tropical monsoon: hot, humid summers, a June-to-October monsoon that delivers most of the year's rain, and a mild, dry winter that is the city's most pleasant season. The same geography that made Dhaka a port makes it vulnerable. Low elevation, high groundwater and intense monsoon rain mean that waterlogging after heavy downpours is a recurring feature of city life, and the rivers that once drained and supplied the city are under severe pressure from pollution and encroachment.
Bangladesh's 2022 census counted 5,990,723 people in Dhaka North City Corporation and 4,305,063 in Dhaka South — a combined 10,295,786 inside the two corporations, at densities of roughly 30,500 and 39,400 people per square kilometre respectively. Dhaka District as a whole held 14,734,701 people. These are the firmest numbers available, and they already make Dhaka one of the most densely populated large cities in the world.
International estimates of the wider metropolis are much larger, and they depend heavily on method. The UN's World Urbanization Prospects 2025, released in November 2025, applies a new harmonised "Degree of Urbanisation" method that draws city boundaries from satellite population grids rather than national definitions. On that basis it puts Dhaka's agglomeration at 36.6 million — second only to Jakarta's 41.9 million — and projects it to reach 52.1 million and first place by 2050. The figure is not comparable with the same agency's older lists, which used national boundaries and put the metro population nearer 23–24 million; both numbers describe the same city through different lenses. What is not in dispute is the direction and the pace: Dhaka has grown from a city of well under a million at independence in 1971 into one of the largest urban concentrations on the planet, driven by migration from across Bangladesh.
Dhaka's civic government has an unusual structure and, at present, no elected leadership. The single Dhaka City Corporation was split in two by an amendment act passed on 29 November 2011, and the undivided corporation ceased to exist on 1 December 2011. Dhaka North City Corporation (DNCC) covers 54 wards; Dhaka South City Corporation (DSCC) covers 75. Each corporation has its own mayor and council when elections are held.
Since August 2024, neither has. On 19 August 2024, days after taking power, the interim government removed the mayors of all twelve of Bangladesh's city corporations and installed administrators. After the BNP government took office, a Local Government Division notification of 22 February 2026 appointed full-time administrators to six corporations, including Dhaka's two: Shafiqul Islam Khan for Dhaka North and Abdus Salam — a former deputy mayor of the undivided corporation — for Dhaka South, each to serve until the corporations are reconstituted or until further orders. A writ petition challenging the appointments was summarily dismissed by the High Court on 29 October 2026. As of late 2026, therefore, both halves of the capital are run by appointed administrators, and the restoration of elected city government depends on local elections that have yet to be scheduled.
Dhaka is where Bangladesh's economy is directed from. The parliament, ministries and courts sit here; so do the headquarters of the central bank, the commercial banks, the Dhaka Stock Exchange, and the head offices and buying liaison offices of the garment industry. A study by the Dhaka Chamber of Commerce and Industry, presented in October 2025, estimated that Dhaka district accounts for about 46 per cent of national GDP, about 40 per cent of employment and about 32 per cent of the urban population, with per-capita income roughly double the national average. The chamber's method was questioned by economists at the same event, and Bangladesh's statistics bureau publishes no official district GDP — the honest summary is that Dhaka's share is very large, plausibly somewhere between the older estimate of about 35 per cent and the chamber's 46 per cent.
The garment trade needs careful handling, because a national figure is often mis-stated as a Dhaka one. Ready-made garments earned about 81.5 per cent of Bangladesh's export income in FY2024–25, but the factories stand mostly in Gazipur, Narayanganj, Ashulia and Chittagong; Dhaka's part is the ownership, merchandising, finance, logistics and design work concentrated in areas such as Uttara, Gulshan, Banani, Motijheel and Tejgaon. Around that core sits a vast services economy — retail, transport, construction, education, health care, media and a growing information-technology and startup sector — and an informal economy of rickshaw pullers, street vendors and day labourers that employs a large share of the workforce. The city's dysfunction is also an economic fact: congestion on Dhaka's streets has been estimated by the Policy Research Institute to cost on the order of 2.5 per cent of GDP in lost time and fuel.
Dhaka is the centre of Bangladeshi higher education. The University of Dhaka, the country's oldest and largest university, opened on 1 July 1921 under the Dacca University Act of 1920, beginning with three faculties, twelve departments, some sixty teachers and 847 students; its campus at Ramna remains the symbolic heart of the nation's student politics and of the language movement commemorated every 21 February. The Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET) descends from the Dacca Survey School of 1876, became the Ahsanullah School of Engineering in 1908 and an engineering college in 1947, and gained university status in 1962. Dhaka Medical College, whose hospital is the country's best-known public teaching hospital, began on 10 July 1946 and marked its eightieth anniversary in 2026.
Around these anchor institutions stand dozens of public and private universities, medical colleges, and specialist institutes, drawing students from every district. The concentration is a strength — Dhaka's universities anchor its publishing, media and professional classes — and a pressure, as hundreds of thousands of young people arrive in the city each year for education and the work that is supposed to follow it.
The city's deepest history is concentrated in Old Dhaka, the dense, largely pre-colonial and colonial-era quarters along the Buriganga. Its best-known monument is Lalbagh Fort, the unfinished Mughal fort-palace begun in 1678, whose story — and the tomb of Pari Bibi at its centre — is told in Wiki Bangla's separate profile of the fort. Nearby stand the Ahsan Manzil, the pink palace of the Nawabs of Dhaka, now a museum; the Armenian Church of 1781; the Dhakeshwari Temple; and the great wholesale markets and food streets around Chawkbazar and Shakhari Bazar, famous for Old Dhaka's biryani and its Iftar trade during Ramadan.
Newer landmarks mark the republic: the Shaheed Minar, honouring the martyrs of the 1952 language movement — the story behind International Mother Language Day — and Louis Kahn's National Parliament House at Sher-e-Bangla Nagar, widely regarded as a masterpiece of twentieth-century architecture. The Bangladesh National Museum at Shahbagh holds the country's principal historical collection. Everyday culture is just as distinctive: Dhaka is a city of rickshaws — tens of thousands of them, many painted in a vivid folk style — of bookshops and little magazines, of Baishakhi new-year processions, and of a street-food scene built around fuchka, chotpoti, kebabs and tea stalls. Few capitals are as loud, as crowded or as alive at street level.
For most of its history Dhaka moved by river and rickshaw; the twenty-first century has added elevated infrastructure at speed. The metro rail's first line, MRT-6, opened between Uttara and Agargaon on 28 December 2022 and was extended to Motijheel on 4 November 2023. The line will run 21.26 kilometres to Kamalapur with 17 stations at a project cost of Tk 33,472 crore; the final Motijheel–Kamalapur section was about 85 per cent complete in September 2026 and is expected to open in July 2027. The Dhaka Elevated Expressway, 19.73 kilometres in total, opened its first section from the airport to Farmgate in September 2023, though the remainder has been delayed — including by protests over its route through Panthakunja Park and Hatirjheel — with completion now targeted for December 2026.
Kamalapur station remains the hub of the national railway, and Sadarghat launch terminal on the Buriganga still dispatches the river fleet to the southern districts. Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport, the country's main gateway, illustrates the city's infrastructure growing pains: its third terminal was soft-opened in October 2023 and would lift capacity from about 8 million to about 20 million passengers a year, but it remained non-operational through 2026 while an operating contract was negotiated, with the government targeting a partial opening in December 2026. Below the elevated lines, the streets belong to buses, cars, motorcycles and the rickshaw — and average traffic speeds remain among the slowest of any major city.
Dhaka's challenges are documented with unusual precision, because the city is measured by every global index going. IQAir's 2024 report, released in March 2025, made Bangladesh the world's second most polluted country and Dhaka its third most polluted capital, with average PM2.5 of 78.0 micrograms per cubic metre — more than fifteen times the WHO guideline. The Economist Intelligence Unit's 2025 liveability index ranked Dhaka 171st of 173 cities, above only Damascus and Tripoli. Add waterlogging, strained water and sewerage systems, and the congestion costs described above, and the indictment is complete.
Yet the same data explains why people keep coming: Dhaka concentrates the country's jobs, universities, hospitals and opportunities as nowhere else does, and its economy keeps growing through its dysfunctions. The metro network is expanding line by line, the expressway and airport terminal inch towards completion, and the UN expects this to be the world's largest city within a generation. Whether that future is governable depends on decisions still pending — restoring elected city government, enforcing building and environmental rules, and planning for the wider metropolis rather than the two corporations alone. Dhaka has reinvented itself at least four times since 1610. The scale of its fifth reinvention is simply larger than any before it.
