I am delighted to be returning to Bangladesh in its Golden Jubilee year, and I look forward to celebrating the tremendous achievements of the past half century with friends old and new.
As is known, the current provisions of the EU’s Generalised System of preferences (EU-GSP) scheme are being revised at present in anticipation of the new scheme to be put in place as of January 1, 2024.
Upon reading the news headline for the incident I am about to discuss, I only felt a momentary, dull pain in my gut or thereabouts. Because while it is a shocking incident that would rob you of hope, the elements of the story are all too familiar to us all.
As tensions over the Taiwan Strait mount, everyone needs to think about whether war is inevitable. Ukrainian revolutionary Leon Trotsky once said: “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” And if we slip into war by what World War I historian Barbara Tuchman called the March of Folly, can the Great Powers step back from mutual nuclear annihilation?
The year 2020 marked a watershed in global efforts to end tuberculosis (TB) by 2030. First, it was because, by 2020, the TB-affected countries aimed to achieve the first set of “End TB” milestones: a 35 percent reduction in TB deaths, a 20 percent
I have been feeling unwell since October 13. After the mayhem in Cumilla, I knew it wouldn’t be the last. With a broken heart, my father-in-law and I, along with my son, decided to continue with our tradition of puja visits and mandap-hopping, yet we were all deeply disturbed, witnessing the carnage unravelling with a helpless rage.
Today, on October 22, we celebrate National Road Safety Day. But why? Not why we care about safety—the devastating toll of accidents makes it clear why it is important—but why call it Road Safety Day? If we are using roads to travel from place to place, and we want to be able to do so safely, why not call it Safe Travels Day?
I was around 10 when I first heard about the idea of, as it was then known, global warming and how Bangladesh will one day go underwater as sea levels rise.
The United Kingdom—as the incoming President of the 26th Conference of Parties (COP26) under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), to be held in Glasgow, Scotland in November—held a ministerial meeting on March 31 to discuss the issue of raising adequate funds for enabling developing countries to tackle climate change.
In-person schooling in Bangladesh has remained shut since March 2020. Children have already lost a full year, equivalent to 0.6 learning-adjusted years of schooling based on the learning gap implied by the World Bank (WB) in its Human Capital Index (2020) for Bangladesh.
The second April of the pandemic is here, and it seems we are back to square one. Just as most institutions were planning to reopen (all of them intending to exercise proper health guidelines, one hopes) after having lost a year to the Covid-19 pandemic,
For this year’s World Health Day, the World Health Organization wanted to highlight the importance of building a fairer and healthier world. In terms of fairness, how do you rate our healthcare system? And when it comes to ensuring a healthy population, how would you rate its performance?
As I settle down to pen this write-up, the incessant calls and messages on my phone serve as a poignant reminder of how our lives have been reshaped and defaced by the Covid-19 pandemic. In response,
This World Health Day, the World Health Organization (WHO) is highlighting the opportunity we have to build a fairer and healthier post-Covid-19 world. For well over a year now,
One of the existential challenges facing the free world today is its disunity over emerging technologies. Divergence between the United States and the European Union in this area has helped China and other autocratic regimes as they forge ahead with developing new tools and establishing rules and norms that will guide many aspects of our lives,
March, the month we just passed, is a very important month for the Bengali nation. Especially, in the year 2021, the significance of the month of March has reached extraordinary levels in the national and historic perspective.
That gross domestic product (GDP) is not a fully satisfying measure of a country’s progress is no longer news. The awareness of GDP’s inadequacies in revealing a nation’s state of development is now almost mainstream.
The lack of representation of marginalised groups in the corridors of power—political, financial, and cultural—is a growing source of global concern.
