From digital to smart: Bangladesh on the growth path
That Bangladesh is a growth superstar of Asia looms large in any global economic forum, be it the World Economic Forum or the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific. This sustained growth has been largely fuelled by the government’s unapologetic push for digitising all government services to citizens, building an ecosystem for technology startups and incentivising the ICT services industry over the last decade and a half.
9m ago
The growth and evolution of our digital economy
In this digital lifestyle, the demarcation between the physical and the virtual has become fuzzy and transmutable.
1y ago
Why Bangladesh's export diversification has not improved in two decades
For other sectors to expand as much as RMG has, they must be given better policy support.
2y ago
How Bangladesh can boost digital entrepreneurship
It is disheartening to see that Bangladesh couldn’t find a place in the top third of the ranking in this very telling study.
2y ago
Pandemic induced accelerated adoption to stay, or revert?
The onset of the Coronavirus pandemic at the beginning of the year 2020 has affected human civilisation like no other since the Spanish Flu pandemic exactly a hundred years ago.
2y ago
Bangladesh and the ongoing technological revolution
In the last one year the coronavirus pandemic has infected more than a hundred million and killed more than two million people around the globe—the pandemic is not yet done.
3y ago
Do mothers ever leave us?
We are brought into this world by our mothers with whom we have an inseparable “biome” connection.
3y ago
June 25, 2018
The uncertainty continues
The Myanmar junta, under the façade of a democratically installed government headed by a titular political icon Aung San Suu Kyi, has been carrying out a campaign of brutal ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslim minority in its Rakhine province with complete impunity even though the world community is keenly aware of the atrocities and flagrant human rights
June 12, 2018
Is Digital Bangladesh taking a dive?
A quarter bigger than the last revised budget, this budget coming in at a whopping Tk 4 lakh 64 thousand crore certainly fits the pattern of double-digit augmentation from year to year with special purse strings reserved for popular mandates like agricultural subsidies, rural infrastructure and social welfare that anyone would expect in an election year.
June 4, 2018
The bittersweet truth about state-owned enterprises
Bangladesh Sugar and Food Industries Corporation (BSFIC) is a state-owned enterprise (SOE) that is among the remnants of a bygone era when, in a post-liberation war-ravaged economy, the sugar and food manufacturing enterprises left behind by non-resident business owners from pre-independence times had to be taken under the stewardship of the state.
May 28, 2018
Moral Dilemma of the drug wars
News about security forces mowing down several dozen “drug dealers” in the last two weeks has got many of us writhing in moral agony over “shootouts” happening on an increasing tempo. True, drug abuse is highly detrimental to our youth and surely drug dealers need to be checked vigorously, but committing the state-sanctioned “ultimate sin” to rid ourselves of some low-level operatives is quite disturbing, to say the least.
May 21, 2018
Some thoughts on Bangladesh's first full-scale communication satellite
On May 11 at 4:14pm US east coast standard time, Bangladesh entered the space technology history books as the latest iteration of the Falcon 9 rocket by SpaceX took off from the Kennedy Space Center Launchpad 39A in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
April 5, 2018
Women's Day shenanigans and a reality check
Huge drum rolls and pageantry surrounded the recent celebrations of International Women's Day. We can obviously feel enlightened on this front, having women as the chief executive of the government and that of the parliament.
March 28, 2018
Threats of the unseen kind
A budding computer scientist pursuing a PhD at the McMaster University, Canada recently wrote a blog post on the increasing human capacity for self-destruction enabled by science. First, it was the atomic bomb created by physicists, then it was the nerve gas created by chemists, and now the neural networks created by cyber nerds that pump enormous power into artificial intelligence bots—bots that can take over our lives, manipulate our behaviour, and pretty much get us to do anything they please.
February 28, 2018
Emerging technologies for an emerging economy
Bangladesh has been riding the growth waves in the last two-and-a-half decades with spectacular results: our exports grew six folds, our GDP quadrupled and our extreme poverty levels got slashed by more than half, not to mention our 30 percent increase in longevity and other human development achievements.
February 15, 2018
Padmaavat: An epic film with lessons for us all
All that brouhaha and petty religiosity surrounding the release of the Bollywood film Padmaavat built up a huge anticipation among moviegoers around the world.
February 10, 2018
Quirks of banking and payment systems
We have some of the strangest banking and payment system strictures in the world.
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