Bhasan Char

Bhasan Char (also rendered Bhashan Char, literally "floating island") is an estuarine alluvial island in the Bay of Bengal, in Hatiya upazila of Noakhali District, formed by Meghna River sedimentation around 2006. The Government of Bangladesh, through the Navy and the Ashrayan-3 project, transformed roughly 13,000 acres of this char into a planned settlement to decongest the Rohingya refugee camps at Kutupalong–Balukhali in Cox's Bazar, which since the August 2017 Myanmar military "clearance operations" had absorbed over 740,000 fleeing Rohingya. The relocation policy rests on Bangladesh's sovereign discretion as a non-signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol; Dhaka therefore treats the arrivals as "Forcibly Displaced Myanmar Nationals" (FDMNs) rather than refugees with full Convention protection, while still observing the customary norm of non-refoulement.

The island settlement, built at a cost of roughly USD 350 million, was engineered to house up to 100,000 people. Its defining feature is a 12-kilometre embankment (later raised) intended to protect against tidal surges, alongside cluster housing, cyclone shelters, schools, hospitals and warehousing managed by the Navy. Critics — including the United Nations and human-rights organisations — initially objected that the site lies in a cyclone-prone zone, is vulnerable to monsoon flooding and submergence, and that early transfers in December 2020 lacked genuine refugee consent and freedom of movement. The UNHCR signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Bangladesh only in October 2021, after which UN agencies began operating on the island; humanitarian access, livelihood opportunities and the right to leave remained contested points.

By 2026 more than 30,000 Rohingya had been relocated to Bhasan Char, with phased transfers continuing as Cox's Bazar pressures persisted and donor fatigue, ration cuts by the World Food Programme, and camp insecurity intensified. The settlement operates as a semi-permanent holding arrangement pending an eventual safe, voluntary and dignified repatriation to Rakhine State — a prospect repeatedly stalled by the post-2021 military coup in Myanmar, the verification disputes under the 2017 Bangladesh–Myanmar repatriation arrangement, and the proceedings against Myanmar at the International Court of Justice under the Genocide Convention (The Gambia v. Myanmar, provisional measures ordered 23 January 2020).

For the BCS examinee, Bhasan Char is a high-probability item in the "Bangladesh and the Contemporary World" / international-relations and current-affairs segments. Expect questions linking it to the Rohingya crisis, the 2017 exodus, the non-refoulement principle, Bangladesh's non-party status to the Refugee Convention, the UNHCR MoU of 2021, and the ICJ case. Examiners frequently test the island's location (Noakhali/Meghna estuary), its Navy-led construction under Ashrayan-3, its planned capacity, and the ethical-humanitarian debate over relocating a stateless population to a vulnerable char — making it a useful bridge between geography, foreign policy and human-rights law.