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The government is set to conduct a survey next month to assess the latest status of the country's manufacturing industry.
The survey on manufacturing industry 2018 will focus on the ownership status, employment, intermediate consumption, value of fixed assets, gross output and other information about the sector.
The state-run Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) will carry out the survey from April to May this year, said officials.
The last survey was conducted by the statistical agency seven years ago, which found the gross output of 42,792 manufacturing units to be Tk 5.39 trillion.
A total of 5.01 million people were engaged in the factories, the 2012 survey found.
"The key objective of the study is to deliver more accurate estimate of the manufacturing industry while measuring the country's gross domestic product (GDP)," said deputy director of the statistical agency and focal point of the study Lizen Shah Nayeem.
"We have already formed primary sample units. A total of 8,500 industries in 64 districts of the country will be surveyed," he said.
It will cost Tk 17.4 million to carry out the survey.
To ensure the coverage of all types of manufacturing industries, the survey will be conducted based on updated business register of the manufacturing sector in the financial year 2017-18, he said.
However, the manufacturing factories are categorised as large, medium, small and micro-industries based on the number of workers they employ.
Industries with 10 or more labourers are micro, industries with 25 to 99 workers are small, with 100 to 250 workers are medium and more than 250 are large factories as defined in the 'Industrial Policy 2016'.
He said all the large industries of the country will be surveyed this time.
"We are also taking into account the Economic Census 2013 as a framework while conducting the survey," he said.
Of the total number of establishments, some 41 per cent was micro type manufacturing units, 37 per cent small type, 14 per cent medium and only 8.0 per cent was large, according to the 2012 survey.
But the total persons engaged were 59.1 per cent in large type of industries, 20.8 per cent in medium, 14.7 per cent in small and only 5.4 per cent in micro-industries.
Khandoker Golam Moazzem, research director at the Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD), said it is a good initiative that the government is going to conduct such a survey.
He said the country's economy is going through a rapid change so is its industries.
"We need updated data on facts like industrial output, or employment, which can help attract more investment," he said.
Such surveys should be carried out regularly, he said.
He said as per the labour force survey, growth of the industrial labour has almost remained static for the last few years in the country when GDP growth was 7.0 per cent.
Three major manufacturing establishments identified by the previous survey were textiles, food products and readymade garments.
"We think the number of large-scale industries hasn't increased at the optimal level during the period, Mr Moazzem said.
The forthcoming study will give more accurate picture of the industrial units, he said.