Chief Editor's Pages Archive - The Oniket Bulletin

Degrees of Doubt: The Private University and the Price of Prestige

Every admission season, the city fills with banners. They promise world standards, global recognition, international collaborations and a golden future, and they are paid for out of tuition collected from families who can ill afford to be misled. We believe those families deserve better than a billboard. We also believe the country deserves a serious…

The state must listen: But it must also decide

I am interested in engaging in the discussion that Bangladesh needs a more disciplined settlement between government and nongovernment voices in policy debate: citizens should read outside advice with a critical eye, nongovernment institutions should accept real accountability for what they claim, and the government should openly decide which of these efforts deserve recognition and…

Credit Is Not a Strategy: Rethinking the Promise of Easy Loans for Farmers

This editorial review examines the state minister for Fisheries and Livestock pledge of easy term, low interest loans for farmers. It weighs the pledge against alternatives that are financially more sustainable and proposes simpler reforms that could raise productivity without loading rural households with debt. We do not dismiss the promise. We test it, because…

The Currency of Shame: How Bangladesh Traded Decency for Virality

Not long ago, a single television set in the living room was enough to bring a Bangladeshi family together, and that shared screen came with a shared, unspoken agreement about what deserved to be seen, spoken aloud, or held onto in memory. That kind of collective filtering barely exists anymore. What has replaced it is…

Between New York and New Delhi, Bangladesh Waits for Its Own Answers

There is a particular kind of political theater in watching two neighbors orbit each other at a global summit without actually meeting. This week in New York, at the 81st session of the United Nations General Assembly, the Prime Minister of Bangladesh is expected to deliver his first address to the world body as head…

The Vagueness of Excellence: What a Bangladeshi Degree Actually Tells Us

As editor-in-chief of this bulletin, I have grown weary of a particular sentence that surfaces in nearly every profile we run of a public figure in this country: graduate of a leading university, later trained by the relevant academy, widely regarded as one of the brightest of his or her generation. It is a formula…

Twenty-Five Years After the Towers Fell: An Economist’s Reckoning

I was a young researcher assembling a PhD proposal for American universities when the towers came down in September 2001. Twenty-five years later, I can still feel the weight of that week, and it is heavier now in memory than it was in the moment. What I watched on television was an attack on a…

The Ninth Pay Scale Is Not the Victory It Looks Like on Paper

Every few years, Bangladesh performs the same ritual. A pay commission is formed, a new scale is announced, government employees celebrate, and newspapers publish headline percentages that sound, on first reading, like genuine progress. The approval of the 9th National Pay Scale in 2026, the most ambitious revision in the country’s history, followed this script…

The Price of a Pact for Bangladesh

We do not run this bulletin to chase headlines, but some developments earn the exclusion. Saudi Arabia and Pakistan’s September 2025 Strategic Mutual Defense Agreement (the first stage pact, an Article 5-style pact declaring an attack on one an attack on both) was, even then, more than routine diplomatic choreography. What has followed has only…

Economy and Policy Governance: An Editor’s Note on 37 Articles, 16 Weeks in the Oniket Bulletin

When I set out to commission this cycle of the Bulletin’s Economy and Policy Governance section, my aim was not to generate a running commentary on whichever ministry statement or IMF mission dominated the week’s headlines. Bangladesh has no shortage of economic news coverage. What it conspicuously lacks are sustained, theory literate analysis that treats…