Weekly Bangladesh Policy Outlook: Analysis, Truth, Debate.
The recurrence of floods across northern and northeastern Bangladesh is not a surprise. It is an annual certainty with worsening intensity. The latest warnings from the Flood Forecasting and Warning Centre forecast flash flooding over low lying areas of Sylhet, Sunamganj, Lalmonirhat, Nilphamari, Rangpur, Gaibandha, Kurigram, and Naogaon, arrived after communities had already suffered extensive…
Women’s representation in South Asian legislatures has long rested on a familiar mechanism: reserved parliamentary seats. Pakistan and Bangladesh, sharing a common colonial and constitutional heritage, both adopted this model as a corrective to entrenched gender exclusion. Yet as a recent analysis in The Oniket Bulletin argues, numerical inclusion without democratic legitimacy does not translate…
Bangladesh’s streaming industry has grown from a handful of experimental apps into a genuine segment of the digital economy in less than a decade. Local platforms such as Bioscope, Chorki, Bongo, and Toffee now compete alongside global entrants like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, vying for a market that industry estimates place at roughly one…
Clean air is the prime example of a shared public good. Yet, in two of South Asia’s most polluted cities, it is being treated as a waste dump for negative externalities. Dhaka and New Delhi are both capital cities defined by the deteriorating quality of their most life-sustaining asset: air. While the World Health Organization…
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The purpose of this article is to examine why Bangladeshi Bangaliana has struggled to develop a cohesive global presence despite the rapid growth of Bangladeshi communities across the world. While migration has created vibrant expatriate populations on every continent, it has not produced a connected cultural network capable of transmitting language, literature and identity across…
Read More “The Scattered Home: Why Bangladeshi Bangaliana Needs a Global Network” »
Humayun Ahmed remains the most widely read Bangla novelist of the post-independence era, a writer whose stories defined how an entire nation understood itself. Born in 1948 in Mohanganj, Netrokona, and raised across the district towns of a young country, he grew up in a household where literature and public service were inseparable. His father,…
Over the past three decades, English medium education has expanded rapidly and become an important component of Bangladesh’s education system. While this stream of education has made a significant contribution to providing internationally recognised education, expanding opportunities for higher studies, and preparing students for the global job market, it has also raised important questions about…
Every Dhaka kid of my generation remembers the sound before the darkness, a small click, and then nothing. Load-shedding didn’t warn you. It arrived mid-sentence, mid-boss-fight, mid-save. You lit a candle, and if you were lucky, your progress had been saved a few minutes earlier. If you weren’t, you replayed the whole level from memory,…
Read More “Borrowed Light: The Prospect for Green Data Centers in Bangladesh” »
The purpose of this article is to examine why Bangladesh continues to remain largely absent from the global beauty pageant, modelling, and celebrity brand ambassador industries despite possessing one of the world’s largest garment manufacturing sectors. It argues that the country’s limited international presence is not the result of a shortage of talent but of…
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Assessing Structural Exposure and the Path to Energy Resilience This article assesses the economic effects of QatarEnergy’s LNG disruption and identifies priorities for strengthening Bangladesh’s energy resilience. The crisis exposes excessive dependence on imported LNG and the cost of underutilised generation without secure fuel. Immediate priorities are transparent procurement and disciplined gas allocation. Medium-term resilience…
Read More “The QatarEnergy Disruption and Bangladesh’s Energy Reckoning” »
