Weekly Bangladesh Policy Outlook: Analysis, Truth, Debate.
For a Bangladeshi farmer, harvest season carries a peculiar duality. A bumper crop of rice, potatoes, or vegetables ought to be an occasion for celebration, yet a striking number of farmers describe the moment with apprehension rather than relief. The disjuncture does not originate in the fields themselves, where yield is the product of soil,…
On 31 August, the Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD), Bangladesh organised a significant discussion titled “E-Governance in Local Government Institutions: Current State and the Way Forward.” The analysis and recommendations presented by the panelists show that Bangladesh has already gained positive momentum on its path toward digital transformation, and that the time has come to…
Read More “E-Governance in Local Government: Bridging the Gaps to 2030” »
In the early 1990s, Bangladeshi cinema discovered a face capable of selling tickets on the strength of a poster alone. Chowdhury Mohammad Shahriar Emon, better known as Salman Shah, entered the industry in 1993 with Keyamat Theke Keyamat and, within roughly three years, redefined what a Bangladeshi leading man could look like on screen, bringing…
Read More “The Star Who Never Faded: Salman Shah and the Wound he Left on Bangladeshi Cinema” »
A recent piece in The Oniket Bulletin, titled Can SAARC Be Revived, and If So, Under Bangladesh’s Leadership, makes a useful contribution by tracing this year’s wave of regional unrest, from Bangladesh’s 2024 uprising to Sri Lanka’s Aragalaya and Nepal’s youth protests, back to a shared institutional vacuum. Its central claim is compelling: a functioning…
Read More “The Missing Ledger: What the SAARC Revival Debate Still Has Not Priced In” »
Over the past decade, the expansion of digital services in Bangladesh has brought significant changes to the country’s public service system. Government information, applications, registration, education, healthcare, social protection and financial transactions are increasingly moving online. There is no doubt that this is an important achievement in Bangladesh’s development. But alongside this progress, a fundamental…
Read More “Digital Accessibility: Laws and Policies Exist, But Where Is the Implementation?” »
Dhaka’s rivers once anchored its identity as a hub of trade and settlement, but the Buriganga and Turag have since deteriorated into little more than open sewers along many of their stretches. The city sends more than eighty percent of its wastewater into these waterways untreated, and over half of its canals have either vanished…
The Theory of Optimal Pollution Microeconomic theory frames pollution as a negative externality: a firm generates emissions alongside its output but bears only its private marginal cost while society absorbs an additional external cost. The socially optimal level of pollution isn’t zero, it’s the point where the marginal social benefit of extra economic activity equals…
A two-day photo exhibition titled Rising Hills, Beyond the Frame recently opened at the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, displaying images of daily life, economic hardship, and resilience among indigenous communities in the Chittagong Hill Tracts. Organised by the Manusher Jonno Foundation, it brought together participants from the United Nations Development Programme, UN Women, the European Union…
Read More “Framed Only at the Margins: Indigenous Culture and the Ethics of Bangladeshi Media” »
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…
Read More “When the Lights Go Out on Orders: The Energy Crisis and Bangladesh’s Knitwear Exports” »
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,…
