The Oniket Bulletin - Page 3 of 38 - Weekly Bangladesh Policy Outlook: Analysis, Truth, Debate.

When the Lights Go Out on Orders: The Energy Crisis and Bangladesh’s Knitwear Exports

September 17, 2026September 17, 2026 editor No Comments

A recent BKMEA survey has surfaced troubling numbers for the country’s knitwear sector: close to fifty five percent of factories polled reported that international buyers had cancelled or scaled back orders due to an ongoing gas and power shortage. The same survey found that about sixty percent of factories had to cut prices just to…

Trade, Commerce & Industry

Beyond the Bookshelf: Why Bangladesh’s Online Library Ambitions Depend on Infrastructure, Not Just Intent

September 17, 2026September 17, 2026 editor No Comments

A recent piece in The Oniket Bulletin by Rimsha Seethe, titled “Building Readers, Not Just Test Takers,” makes a case that deserves wider attention: Bangladesh has the community organizations, the political will and increasingly the digital tools needed to build a reading culture, yet lacks the deliberate policy architecture to connect them into a funded,…

Education

Why Has Health Insurance Failed to Take Root in Bangladesh? Government Mismanagement or Structural Weakness? Part- 2

September 17, 2026September 17, 2026 editor No Comments

The first article in this series on health insurance could not cover every relevant issue and dimension of the subject. It is therefore necessary to examine the remaining questions in a second part. Why Is Private Wealth Bangladesh’s Invisible Health Insurance? This is one of the most concerning features of Bangladesh’s health economy. When no…

Health

After the Ninth Pay Scale, Has the State Really Improved Job Security? Part: 2

September 17, 2026September 17, 2026 editor No Comments

Without Pension Reform Alongside the Pay Scale, the Equation Remains Incomplete A government employee’s working life ends with retirement, but their expenses do not. In many cases, medical costs, medicines, dependent family members and the need for financial security increase with age. Therefore, pensions cannot be treated as a separate issue when discussing a new…

Law & Local Governance

Rethinking Local Governance: Citizen Rights at the Centre of Bangladesh’s e-Governance Agenda

September 17, 2026September 17, 2026 editor No Comments

Background On August 31, the Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD) convened a national dialogue titled “e-Governance in Local Government Institutions: Present Status and the Way Forward.” The event brought together researchers, civil society representatives, government officials, and young citizens to examine how digital tools are reshaping local governance in Bangladesh, and to what extent they…

Politics, Democracy & Citizen Rights

Before the Alien Lands: What Bangladesh Still Needs to Get Right on AI

September 17, 2026September 17, 2026 editor No Comments

When Bill Gates told Reuters recently that no government on Earth is genuinely prepared for what artificial intelligence is poised to unleash on society, he wasn’t singling out any one nation for criticism. He was pointing to a structural truth that technologists in this space have long recognized: policy has spent years racing to keep…

Science, Technology & Innovation

The Behavioral and Cultural Limitations Stopping Bangladeshi Youth from Growing a Reading Habit

September 10, 2026September 10, 2026 editor No Comments

Reading for pleasure has been quietly disappearing from the daily lives of young people in Bangladesh. While literacy rates have improved an access to information has expanded, the habit of reading books, especially outside the classroom, has weakened considerably. Understanding why this is happening requires looking closely at both behavioral tendencies and deep-rooted cultural attitudes…

Art, Literature, History & National Heritage

Bangladesh’s Sustainable Agriculture and Food Security: A Race Against Time and Population

September 10, 2026September 10, 2026 editor No Comments

Bangladesh has long been celebrated for pulling itself from the brink of famine to near self-sufficiency in rice, but that achievement is now colliding with a harder question: can the country feed a population that keeps growing on a land base that keeps shrinking? How this question is resolved will influence Bangladesh’s progress toward its…

Agriculture

Beyond the Financing Bottleneck: Reassessing Bangladesh’s 2026 Gas Security Crisis

September 10, 2026September 10, 2026 editor No Comments

Wahidul Islam’s recent article in The Oniket Bulletin, ‘The Hidden Bottleneck: How Credit, Banking, and Legal Gaps Are Choking Bangladesh’s Gas Imports’, makes an important case that sovereign credit deterioration, banking weakness and gaps in trade-finance architecture have constrained Bangladesh’s ability to secure LNG.1 That diagnosis matters, but finance is one transmission mechanism within a…

Trade, Commerce & Industry

The Sun as Policy: Assessing Bangladesh’s Solar Incentive Push

September 10, 2026September 10, 2026 editor No Comments

Bangladesh’s leadership has positioned solar power as a key component of the nation’s energy strategy, promoting incentives for both rooftop and utility scale photovoltaic installations as part of a broader effort to strengthen energy security. This ambition is well supported by geographic and economic factors, but turning that potential into lasting, equitable benefit will take…

Sustainability & Urban Planning