Khulnaculture & etiquette

Khulna's piped supply does not come from under Khulna. Local groundwater and the surrounding rivers are too saline to rely on, so the Khulna Water Supply Project — financed by the ADB and JICA and completed in 2019 — built an intake on the Modhumoti river tens of kilometres away and a treatment plant with about 110,000 cubic metres a day of capacity, then piped it in. That is an enormous amount of engineering to avoid a local aquifer, and it is the clearest possible statement of the problem. Ask a prospective landlord where the building's water comes from, whether it is on the KWASA mains or a bore, and what its dry-season taste and TDS are like. In April and May even the Modhumoti turns brackish.

Cyclone Remal made landfall near Mongla late on 26 May 2024. Around 400,000 people in Khulna district were affected, roughly 50,000 homes were damaged, and about 61 kilometres of embankments across Khulna, Satkhira and Bagerhat were breached or damaged. The Sundarbans absorbed a great deal of the surge and were themselves flooded for about thirty hours. Learn the Bangladesh Meteorological Department's signal system, know where your nearest cyclone shelter is, and keep several days of water, power and cash. This is a routine seasonal duty here, not disaster tourism.

Private-sector employment runs through BIDA on an E visa; NGO and INGO employment runs through the NGO Affairs Bureau on an N visa; export processing zone employment runs through BEPZA. A common error in this region is assuming a 'Khulna EPZ' exists — it does not. BEPZA's zone for the southwest is Mongla EPZ, beside the port about fifty kilometres away in Bagerhat district, and a job there is a BEPZA file with a Mongla address, not a Khulna one. Get this right before anything is lodged: a file in the wrong system is restarted, not transferred.

You are resident if present for 182 days or more in the income year, or 90 days or more if you were in Bangladesh for more than 365 days across the four preceding years. The income year runs 1 July to 30 June. That is national law, identical in Dhaka and Chattogram, and every element of it differs from the assumption most arrivals bring. Khulna's only local wrinkle is administrative: your taxes zone and circle are here, and the exit clearance certificate has to come from your own circle.

On the morning of 6 November 2025, Khulna recorded an air quality index of 229 — 'very unhealthy' — against Dhaka's 177, Rajshahi's 167 and Chattogram's 99. Bangladesh was the world's second most polluted country in 2025 with a national annual PM2.5 average of 66.1 µg/m³, and the assumption that a smaller, greener, coastal city breathes better does not hold here in the dry season. Plan for it the way a Dhaka resident does — purifiers in the bedrooms before December, and outdoor exercise as a decision rather than a habit.

The government closed 25 state-owned jute mills on 2 July 2020, sending around 25,000 workers into voluntary retirement; the Khalishpur mill area in Khulna emptied out and has not recovered. Shrimp has gone the same way more slowly — Khulna, Bagerhat and Satkhira account for roughly 90 per cent of national shrimp exports, but of 109 registered processing factories only about 30 in Khulna remain operational, and tiger-prawn pond area in Khulna fell from 36,151 hectares in 2018–19 to 32,383 in 2023–24. Anyone taking a commercial role here should understand that the growth story is Mongla port and its zone, not the industries the city is named for.