The dashboard panel shows a fascinating array of instruments--a large LCD screen constantly shows the mileage and a professional navigation system shows maps of cities. At Tejgaon, the roads are cluttered with walking women figures, returning home after their shifts at garment factories. The man behind the steering wheel himself owns several garment factories in Dhaka City. He talks of his next venture in a composite textile mill.

Inside one of these 'garment' women's 'home', Farida cooks. A 10 feet by 12 feet room that she shares with three other women in the semi-slum area of West Raza Bazar. In one corner some gaudy, cheap clothes dangle from two wooden hangers. Some low-priced ladies shoes with heels line up under the beds, a shelf holds a small mirror, some lipsticks, a Fair and Lovely cream, a Meril powder, hair clips and combs, and a framed photograph taken in a studio where Farida is seen in a sari.

"I want to buy a cassette player soon," she says with a smile.

From the BMW owner to Farida, everybody is pursuing a dream; a dream for upward mobility. Only that they are branching off fast with a widening gap makes Bangladesh yet another showcase for rich-poor inequality. A quite balanced society some 30 years ago, Bangladesh now ranks as a moderately unbalanced society where despite growth in GDP, reduction in poverty -- only 0.5 percent a year which is far short of the government's claim of 1 percent -- and advancements in some social indicators -- lowered child mortality rate, higher use of contraceptives, immunisation and narrowing gender gap in schooling, incomes of the rich and poor are increasing disproportionately.

The genie coefficient -- a measurement of income inequality -- clearly shows the deepening rich-poor gap. On a scale of 0-1, the coefficient was 0.259 in 1991-92 and it reached 0.306 in 2000.

This is also evident in the income gap between the rich and the poor. Between 1999 and 2004, the poor's income increased by 4.8 percent, while it increased by 19.4 percent for the non-poor, the preliminary report of the Poverty Monitoring Survey 2004 shows. The rural poor are even worse off, with their income increasing by only 0.54 percent against the urban people's 7.97 percent.

"The widening income disparity in Bangladesh is explained most convincingly when we compare the income shares of top and bottom quintiles of the population," a CPD report says. "Between 1999 and 2004, national income attributable to the poorest 10 percent of Bangladesh population declined from the minuscule proportion of 1.7 percent to 1.5 percent. Conversely, the control on the national income by the richest 10 percent of the population increased from 33.9 percent in 1999 to 36.5 percent in 2004." In other words, the income difference between the poorest and the richest increased from 20 times in 1999 to 24.5 times in 2004. Not only this, the urban-rural income difference also continually increased up to the mid-1990s, and this trend was reversed only in the later half of the 1990s with a strong agricultural growth.

The Household Expenditure Survey of the BBS shows that on-farm income is more unequally distributed compared to the rural income as a whole, and it became increasingly so throughout the 1990s. In urban areas, poverty declined substantially both in the seven-year period of the 1980s and in the first half of the 1990s, but in the later period there was also a marked increase in inequality. In the later half of the 1990s, there was only a modest increase in income, but there was not much further worsening of income distribution. The result was only a slight decline in poverty.

But many economists would pause for a moment before condemning such a process of inequality.

"Overall, it seems that Bangladesh is precariously positioned in the growth-inequality link as in the initial stage of the Kuzets process," says Dr Wahiduddin Mahmud. "The problem assumes special significance in a situation whereby the very process that brings some initial dynamism in the system also contains factors that lead to deterioration in the distribution of income."

The Kuzets process is a curve in growth and inequality. It shows that any economy in its primary take-off increases inequality, as only a section of the population can reap most of the benefits of the new opportunities. Then, as the economic growth progresses, the rich-poor gap narrows down.

But then growth comes as a tricky question for many. The episodes of higher growth in both urban and rural areas seem to have been associated with increasing inequality, thus reducing the favourable effect of income growth on poverty reduction.

Dr Mahmud still prefers this to having lower growth with equity having a smaller impact on poverty reduction. "But this can hardly be a happy choice," he adds. "A serious challenge in achieving a pro-poor growth, therefore, is to modify or reverse this adverse growth-inequality link."

Dr Zahid Hossain, economist at the World Bank, said in Bangladesh inequality has increased but poverty has also reduced. "It could be that without inequality there would not have been any growth."

His argument lies in the assumption that as new opportunities emerge with the opening up of an economy, it is the richer class that grabs the benefits first.

"The immediate beneficiaries will be the well-off people and then the opportunities will trickle down," Dr Zahid says. "But it will not benefit the poor as much as it will benefit the rich. But that does not mean poverty will not decrease. We don't know how to address such outcome, we don't know if it is morally preferable [to address this]."

But Dr Debapriya Bhattacharya, executive director of the CPD, says one need not accept the Kuzets curve as economic fatalism.

"One can see from historical experience that a society which allows better distributive justice in economic growth based on improved policy management, institutional development and good governance alleviates poverty faster," he says. "There is a cavalier assumption that growing inequality has nothing to do with per capita income growth or absolute poverty reduction. But the fact is the higher the income inequality the more difficult it is to alleviate poverty and Latin America is a case in point."

Debapriya points out that the level of inequality not only affects poverty alleviation rate -- decrease in the number of the absolute poor -- but also jeopardises the future growth prospect, as has happened in the 1990s in Bangladesh.

But as long as this process is not reversed, consumption patter also keeps changing fast, both in urban and rural spheres. New chains of shops keep mushrooming in cities, and even in villages marketing companies keep expanding their networks, shipping newer and newer goods for the better-off people.

A walk through Agora, the city's largest new chain shop, is just a testimony to this new phenomenon. Imported luxury items rake up the shelves. Freezers are stuffed with imported fast food -- pizza slices, chicken nuggets and meat loaves, to name a few. Beside the fruit shelf of imported exotic fruits such as kiwi and black currants is the meat freezer showing imported Australian lamb priced at Tk 600 a kg. Dhaka is now turning into a city of mega shops -- every main street now has its own sideshows of swanky malls. Shop prices are shooting up. A barely 120 square feet shop in Bailey Road changes hands fast, passing on from one broker to another, to finally sell at Tk 40 lakh.

At Chandrabati village in Bhairab, shops are selling Tk 10 packs of chips, Tk 2 shampoo mini packs, coke, condensed milk and Meril soaps. Nazim Mollah runs such a shop in the village. The small outlet is sparsely stuffed. "Where are the customers?" he asks. "Somehow I manage to survive." And yet he has a handful of takers for the items, people who have managed to make that difference between them and the rest.

Although Nazim Mollah's lots have not changed much, many like him have graduated to a higher level to crate another kind of inequality in the villages. They are basically the landless people who somehow found ways into non-farm activities, such as small shops and rickshaw repairing shops. Like Nizam they were self-employed with low productivity, but their business increased rapidly in the 1990s, because of more microcredit interventions. They graduated from microcredit borrowers to more productive entrepreneurs like small rice mill owners.

"The inequality happened at this stage in two ways," says Dr Mahmud. "First, the entrepreneurs who graduated were richer than the self-employed small operators. And the more productive entrepreneurs employed salaried skilled workers. These workers had better pay than the unskilled workers to create another layer of inequality."

"The worsening of income can be alleviated to some extent if there is strong growth in agricultural income," Dr Mahmud argues.

"The sectors which are inequality-neutral or which can lower inequality, such as agriculture, are witnessing a low growth," says Dr Imran Matin, director, research and evaluation division of Brac. "This phenomenon is fuelling inequality."

But agriculture, specially the crop sector, has been limping for the last few years. After a relatively better growth of 5.53 percent in FY01, agriculture growth plummeted to a negative of 0.62 percent the next year. FY03 and FY04 saw a little progress when growth reached 3.29 percent and 4.38 percent, much less than the overall economic growth rates of both the years, and then it again slid to a negative of 0.37 percent.

Much of these low-case figures came from farmers like Mahbubur Rahman of Netrakona who witnessed another bad crop this year following a deluge.

"I have not seen any increase in my harvest in many years. It has always been 40-45 maunds from an acre," Mahbub says. "Rather it often flops like this year when I am hit by floods or drought. This year, prices increased, but I am a small farmer with hardly anything to sell."

And agriculture spins out inequalities in its own way. When the crop sector that contributes near to 17 percent of the GDP stagnates, fisheries and livestock sub-sector that contributes only about 3 percent to the GDP do quite well, growing from 2.81 percent in FY01 to 7.82 percent in FY05. This happens because of a boom in poultry and fishery projects involving the rural richer section.

Abdul Barkat represents that section of the rural rich. On his return from Kuwait three years ago, he invested Tk 3 lakh in a poultry scheme that has now grown to a 200-chicken farm.

"I sell them at Tk 70 a kg now," says Barkat, also from the same village of Mahbub. "Not bad if you can pull through."

But Mahbub has no chance to get a pie of that market. "I don't have money," he says. "You need a lot of money for poultry. I am a poor farmer. I use my own seeds and buy some fertilisers and pesticides often on delayed payment. I have no luck there."

Barkat and Mahbub, Farida and the BMW owner are the faces of the inequality that have been becoming sharper by the day. And the fallout can be widespread and cyclical -- from increase in violence and militancy to a retarded growth. Domestic demand will be squeezed and human capital development process will be constrained that will jeopardise the growth prospect.