Urban floods resulting from climate change and unplanned urban growth are creating tremendous stress on the urban poor who are already living in vulnerable conditions. This paper sets out to analyse the livelihood status of the urban poor in a regular situation and a situation under stress due to urban flood in Dhaka city. Two urban poor settlements were surveyed; 400 households were interviewed. It was found that the urban poor households had different types of livelihood capitals at different levels which expressed the livelihood status of the households. In a normal situation, slum dwellers were living with a moderate level of livelihood status, which dropped down to a poor level during a stressed period. The store of capitals of households influenced the capacity of a household to cope with stressed situations because adaptive capacity and sensitivity were controlled by the stock of capitals. Capitals were influencing each other internally, which produced differences in livelihood status among households in both normal and stressed situations. The geographical setting, intensive flooding, poor socio‐economic conditions, and lack of collective actions profoundly increased the vulnerability of slum dwellers. These findings suggest that more emphasis should be given to improve capital assets, particularly human capital and social capital, for increasing the capabilities of the urban poor to reduce poverty and to cope with periods of crisis.

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Being part of the Indian subcontinent both the North Eastern region of India and the Bangladesh share a long common cultural, economic and political history. One of the most critical problems of developing countries like India as well as Bangladesh is their enormous increase in human population. Contraceptive Prevalence Rate (CPR) of India is 48.3 and that of Bangladesh is 53.8. As the large majority of population of both the countries belong to rural area, the family planning programmes have largely remained unsuccessful because of many factors including lack of availability of contraceptive drugs in rural markets, lack of accessibility of rural people to medical personnel as well as the lack of acceptability of synthetic drugs due to various socio-cultural and religious perceptions prevailing among many ethnic communities. These contributed to a growing interest among researchers in developing contraceptives of natural origin and at present natural herbal contraception have become one of the major focuses of modern contraceptive research. Since time immemorial herbal drugs are being practiced by various rural communities and ethnic tribes in North East India as well as in Bangladesh, and hence the acceptability of herbal contraceptives is expected to be much higher among rural folk. In different parts of North East India and Bangladesh, ethnic communities are using plant based medicinal products till today. This study aims at highlighting the contraceptive property of some plants found in North-Eastern India as well as in Bangladesh.

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