The narrow streets of Old Dhaka’s Moulvibazar hum with activity: commodity trading. On mobile phones, wholesalers fervently follow prices on trading floors in Chicago and London to bet on the local prices of sugar and edible oil. In and around tea stalls in this gloomy corner of Dhaka, even idle chats are centred around the price movement on the London Commodity Exchange, the Chicago Board of Trade, and the Bursa Malaysia.

While a walk through Mitford is an unforgettable treat for the olfactory senses, there are ill winds threatening to blow over those sweet scents and the businesses that produce them.

On a Wednesday afternoon, we were walking along one of the dusty roads of Dhaka that everyone can easily imagine – a path littered with debris and puddles of murky water.

While Bangladesh’s garment sector struggles  to transition from basic products to high-end items, too many companies are going in for the same international contracts, intensifying competition among themselves.

Walk down the road in Savar, Gazipur or Narayanganj in the morning hours and you will see a long line of workers heading to work.

Mirpur was best known as a garment manufacturing hub, a crime zone with rough roads, dirty alleyways, rundown buses, a capital of slums called home by apparel workers and a poor township marked by nondescript houses.