Rural development,class structure and bureaucracy in Bangladesh

For a time in the mid-1960s, the Comilla programme in Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) seemed to represent a viable answer to the quest for a rural development programme that would truly benefit small farmers. In the ensuing years, however, the programme came to be dominated by the bigger farmers, largely because of the realities of class structure at the macro- and micro-levels. But there were also bureaucratic factors involved that had an existence independent of any class context, factors which would have biased any rural development programme toward rural elites, even in the absence of a class structure at national level that favoured these elites.