North Bengal: Poor People or Poor Region

I never lived in Rangpur. Besides Dhaka, the only other place in Bangladesh I lived in is Comilla, where I was born and brought up. Recently, I had the opportunity to visit Rangpur to attend a workshop, which was dominated by the discussion of regional disparity. Rangpurian expressed their anger and frustration for the ‘systematic negligence to North Bengal’ and called for immediate remedial measures. To substantiate their demand, some participants provided statistics highlighting the negligence to North Bengal.
I always love to travel by road as it gives me an opportunity to see the countryside. While traveling by road, my mind easily gets engrossed in seeing the natural beauty of my beloved country. This is the reason why I don’t like talkative fellow passengers in my travel.
After the workshop I returned to Dhaka by road. I was the only passenger in the car, yet my mind was distracted during the trip. I could not avoid thinking what the Rangpurian said in the workshop - the systematic negligence to North Bengal.
I noticed that there was not a single industry between the borders of Bogra and Rangpur town. Who doesn’t know about the Monga of North Bengal? Now-a-days, I see plenty of migrants from North Bengal in Dhaka, even in Comilla, doing the low-paid manual jobs. Undoubtedly, the North Bengal is a lagging region in Bangladesh. But, why?
Theoretically, as pointed out by a noted economist named Martin Ravallion, there can be two reasons for a region to lag behind the rest of the country. One of them is poor people of the region in the sense that they lack adequate factors of production which include not only land and capital but also entrepreneurship, skill, education etc. The second reason is the poor region itself in the sense that returns to factors of production is low in there. As a result, a certain amount of factor endowment does not yield the same amount of return in the lagging region as it does in the other parts of the country.
People of a particular region of a country can be endowed with less factors of production like skill and education as a result of sustained policy discrimination or their innate inability to acquire them. There are no ethnical or racial variations in mainland Bangladesh, except for some pockets here and there. Therefore, it is very difficult to presume that the people of North Bengal are less able to acquire human capital than the rest of the country. Whether the people of North Bengal have less factor endowment due to policy discrimination is an empirical question.
A region could be poor for many reasons. The most important ones are the lack of infrastructure and access to backbone services required for production and trade. The profitability of any investment depends on them. Why an investor will set up an industry in North Bengal if the quality of infrastructure and access to backbone services in there are not at par with the rest of the country?
Although the economic backwardness of the North Bengal is a much-talked about topic, I am not aware of any study that investigates whether it is due to poor people or poor region. In my next incarnation in research, I will definitely try to answer this question.