This book gives names and faces to some of the world's poorest people, the inhabitants of a Bangladesh village. Although no microcosm can perfectly mirror the whole, an in depth exploration of one place can reveal the human dimensions of the larger picture. The authors lived at Katni, a typical Bangladesh village, in a hut they built themselves to find out what life at the margin in the Third World meant. This book is a record of that experience: their environment, the people they met, social relations, land distribution and agriculture, family planning, trade, linkages of village with city, politics, attitudes to change. The intimate relationship they developed with the villagers with whom they lived provided them with vivid insights into village life, the motivations and ambitions of the villagers, their social and occupational organization. For anyone interested on what village life in the Third World really means this is a moving social document; for sociologists, economist and social planners an important micro study of the impact of development on village life ken both from the human and statistical perspectives.