Rows and rows of neatly set blocks of two-roomed tenements line the eastern corner of Bhasan Char, a 40-sq km sand-bar island off the coast of Bangladesh on the Bay of Bengal within Bangladesh’s territorial waters.

Women cradle their babies in the narrow and cramped balconies of this sprawling mass of concrete while the men idly wander about this bleak island colony that is now home to about 20,000 Rohingya refugees, relocated a few years ago when the settlements in Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar began to get over-populated.