Chittagong Hill Tracts
The Chittagong Hill Tracts, often shortened to simply the Hill Tracts and abbreviated to CHT, includes the three hilly districts within the Chittagong Division in southeastern Bangladesh, bordering India and Myanmar in the east: Khagrachhari, Rangamati, and Bandarban. Covering, CHT is an extensively hilly area and home to a variety of tribal peoples in Bangladesh. The CHT were divided by the British in the 19th century into three tribal chieftaincies, the Chakma Circle, the Mong Circle and the Bohmong Circle. They formed a single district until 1984, when they were divided into three separate districts.
Geography
The Chittagong Hill Tracts is an extensive hilly area in Bangladesh, lie in the southeastern part of the country bordering the Indian state of Tripura on the north,Rakhine State of Myanmar on the south, Chin state of Myanmar and Indian state Mizoram on the east, Chittagong District and Cox's Bazar District on the west. The area of the Chittagong Hill Tracts is about 13,184 km2, which is approximately one-tenth of the total area of Bangladesh. The Chittagong Hill Tracts combine three hilly districts of Bangladesh: Rangamati, Khagrachhari and Bandarban districts.
The mountainous rugged terrain with deep forests, lakes and falls gives it a different character from the rest of Bangladesh.
Saka Haphong, the highest peak of Bangladesh, is located here. Though officially Tazing Dong is declared as the highest peak, it is also located here. Keokradong is another famous peak in this area.
Topography
The landscape of the Chittagong Hill Tracts is predominantly hilly, featuring a series of parallel ridges with altitudes ranging from 200 to over 1,000 meters above sea level. The highest peak in Bangladesh, Keokradong, is located in Bandarban District. The terrain consists of steep slopes, narrow valleys, and occasional flatlands, making it distinct from the rest of Bangladesh's floodplains.The Chittagong Hill Tracts are traversed by several important rivers, the largest being the Karnaphuli River, which originates in the hills and flows into the Bay of Bengal. The Kaptai Dam, built on the Karnaphuli River, has created Kaptai Lake, the largest artificial lake in Bangladesh. Other significant rivers include the Sangu, Matamuhuri, and Feni Rivers.
The region is home to tropical and subtropical evergreen forests, which support a rich diversity of flora and fauna. The forests include species such as teak, garjan, and bamboo. The wildlife of CHT features mammals like elephants, leopards, and deer, along with a variety of bird species. However, deforestation and human activities have led to ecological challenges in recent years.
The soil in the Chittagong Hill Tracts is mostly red and yellow sandy loam, which is less fertile compared to the alluvial soils of the Bangladeshi plains. Due to the steep slopes, jhum cultivation is traditionally practiced by the indigenous communities. However, efforts are being made to introduce sustainable agricultural methods to prevent soil erosion and land degradation.
Natural resources
The region is rich in natural resources, including timber, bamboo, and various minerals. Kaptai Lake has also become an important source of hydroelectric power, contributing to Bangladesh's energy supply. However, environmental concerns have been raised due to deforestation, resource extraction, and changes in land use.Land use and environment
Tobacco cultivation
Tobacco cultivation is damaging the ecology of the area, with the loss of indigenous trees such as Chukrasia tabularis, and soil fertility.Most of the farmers of Rangamati, Bandarban, and Khagrachhari have been losing their interest in cultivating their own indigenous crops after defaulting on loans provided by tobacco companies.
Environmental issues
Like other mountainous areas in South and Southeast Asia, the Chittagong Hill Tracts are undergoing deforestation and land degradation arising from environmentally unsuitable activities such as tobacco cultivation in sloping land, shifting cultivation and logging. Shifting cultivation, also known as slash-and-burn agriculture or swidden cultivation, embraces a large variety of primitive forms of agriculture. It is a unique stage in the evolution from hunting and food gathering to sedentary farming. Humankind began to change its mode of life from food gatherer to food producer about 7000 B.C. by adopting shifting cultivation. Some form of shifting cultivation has been practised in most parts of the world, but more intensive forms of agriculture have subsequently replaced it.The present shifting cultivation system with short fallow periods in the Chittagong Hill Tracts has accelerated erosion, land degradation, deforestation, and impoverishment of tribal people in CHT. If the present state of degradation is continued, most of the areas under shifting cultivation will be severely degraded and future generations will face more difficulties in eking out their livelihoods on further degraded land, although there is some scope for shifting cultivators to leave the degraded fields and move to other areas. It is estimated that on average eight hectares of land is necessary for the sustenance of a family in the Chittagong Hill Tracts. If this ratio is adopted, 1,240,000 ha land is required to sustain the present population; however, the total land available, excluding the reserve forest, is 928,000 ha. Shifting cultivation, therefore, cannot fulfill even the subsistence requirements of the people. In such a situation, either large non-farm employment opportunities need to be created or more productive land-use systems need to be developed and adopted. Given the sluggish growth of the economy, there is limited scope for generating adequate non-farming employment opportunities in the near future. It is, therefore, imperative to replace the present shifting cultivation system with more productive and sustainable land use systems to enable people to secure their livelihoods.
Climate
The region experiences a tropical monsoon climate, with high temperatures and significant seasonal variations in precipitation. Annual rainfall averages between 2,000 and 3,500 millimeters, mostly occurring during the monsoon season from June to September. Winters are mild and dry, while summers are hot and humid.Language
The Chittagong Hill Tracts constitutes a zone of intense linguistic convergence, characterised by high ethnolinguistic vitality and diversity. The region serves as a meeting point for two major language families: Indo-European and Sino-Tibetan. While Bengali functions as the lingua franca for administration and inter-community commerce, the region is home to at least 11 distinct indigenous languages, each possessing unique phonological and morphological characteristics.Indo-Aryan languages
Despite the prevalence of Tibeto-Burman ethnicity in the region, the two largest indigenous groups—the Chakma and the Tanchangya—speak languages classified as Eastern Indo-Aryan.Chakma
Linguists classify modern Chakma as a divergent dialect of the Southeastern Bengali-Assamese continuum, closely related to Chittagonian. However, it retains a Tibeto-Burman substrate, particularly in its vocabulary related to flora, fauna, and domestic life, suggesting a historical language shift where the community adopted a neighboring Indo-Aryan tongue while retaining elements of their ancestral speech.Tanchangya
Closely related to Chakma, Tanchangya is often mutually intelligible with it but maintains distinct phonological variations.Tibeto-Burman Languages
The majority of the smaller indigenous communities speak languages belonging to the Tibeto-Burman family. These are further categorized into distinct branches:; Arakanese
The Marma people speak a non-standard dialect of Arakanese, which belongs to the Lolo-Burmese branch. It is tonal and mutually intelligible with dialects spoken in the neighboring Rakhine State of Myanmar.
; Kuki-Chin
This branch includes the languages of the Bawm, Pangkhua, Lushei, Khumi, and Khyang peoples. These languages are agglutinative and are linguistically linked to the Chin languages of Myanmar and the Mizo language of India.
; Mruic
The Mro language is considered distinct within the Tibeto-Burman family, often classified under a separate Mruic branch due to its isolation. It preserves archaic linguistic features that have been lost in neighboring Kuki-Chin languages.
Writing systems and scripts
The CHT exhibits a "literary divide" reflecting historical religious influences. The scripts in use can be broadly categorized into Brahmic-derived, Roman, and Messianic inventions.Brahmic scripts
The Chakma and Tanchangya languages use the Chakma script, an abugida related to the Burmese and Khmer scripts, historically preserved by village medicine men for writing herbal charts and religious texts like the Agara Tara. The Marma use the Burmese script with minor regional variations.Roman script
The Kuki-Chin linguistic groups predominantly use the Roman script. This adoption was largely driven by Christian missionaries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries who translated religious texts into local vernaculars using Latin orthography.Mro (Krama) script
Uniquely, the Mro people utilize a "messianic" script known as Mro Chai, which was revealed/created in the 1980s by a Mro leader named Menlay Mro. It was developed as a rejection of both Roman and Bengali scripts to preserve Mro cultural autonomy.Sociolinguistics and preservation
The sociolinguistic landscape of the CHT is characterized by widespread bilingualism and diglossia. While indigenous languages are used in the domestic sphere, Bengali serves as the language of education, law, and administration. This dynamic has led to significant lexical borrowing, or code-mixing, where Bengali terms are frequently incorporated into indigenous speech.In 2017, in an effort to curb language endangerment, the Government of Bangladesh's National Curriculum and Textbook Board launched the Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education program. Textbooks were distributed in five indigenous languages—Chakma, Marma, Kokborok, Garo, and Sadri—for pre-primary levels. However, critics note that the initiative faces hurdles, including a shortage of trained native-speaking teachers and the absence of a curriculum for higher grades.