People, both individually and collectively, prepare a wish list for a New Year. What should be the wish list like for an average Bangladeshi and the nation as a whole? A country in the throes of political anarchy and economic collapse does hardly spare any individual. The interests of an individual thus correspond to those of the nation. Right now the wish lists of the majority of people in Bangladesh have been squeezed into one simple desperate yearning. The yearning concerns nothing but just to have the right to enjoy a normal life. Sure enough, there are people who had to struggle hard to keep their body and soul together even before chaos started reigning supreme. But for about the past three months, the right to live a normal life has been snatched away from them. And all this is in the name of preserving their rights and privileges. How perverted the logic is!
People look forward to a New Year as a fresh phase in their life when they can learn from past mistakes and renew their promises or vows for a better and nobler cause in an effort to add quality to their own lives and the lives of those around them. But when powerful quarters behave insanely to make a hell of a life for others living in society, the disappointment, sufferings and losses incurred weigh as a stupendous burden. The country is in sickbed, soon it might go into a coma and be on life support. So there is little scope for an individual or people in general to go for an extensive wish list; rather all have to curtail the list to just a single demand, the demand for a normal and peaceful life.
At a time when people's enthralled exuberance in welcoming the New Year 2014 swept across the globe, the tone and tenor of celebration of the occasion in Bangladesh was a more or less subdued affair. Why it was so is quite understandable. Yet the country showed so much promise when the rest of the world was reeling from the combined effect of economic downturn and a number of natural calamities believed to be rooted in the global warming. Had internecine politics not caused the country to bleed unremittingly, the country would have stood a fair chance of becoming a model of economic miracle within a short time. Already its achievements have received rapt attention from some of the world's prestigious magazines, leading financial services firm and think tanks. All have predicted a bright future for this country with an oversize population.
Considering the assessments made by such famed agencies, there were reasons to make a long list of wishes now. Despite the reversals suffered by the garments industry on account of safety issue, a plan was afoot to take the bull by the horn. A new wage board, albeit not fully to the satisfaction of the workers, could be introduced after it had witnessed violent labour unrest for sometime. Now was the time to mend the rift and go for the implementation of the recommendations on ensuring amiable labour relations and effective safety measures in garments factories. Even the labour unrest did not force foreign buyers to divert their orders to other countries from Bangladesh. But the political stand-off has. How one wished that the export consignments of garments were exempted from hartals and blockades!
Similarly, farmers feeding the nation against all odds deserved a better treatment. Why agricultural produces on which depend both the producers' livelihoods and the rest of the nation's food supply could not be kept out of the purview of hartals and blockades is a million-dollar question. Farmers are no party to the political feud nor are the menial labourers, small traders who struggle to make both ends meet even in normal time. Income erosion will definitely tell on their living standard and a large segment of society will plunge below the poverty line because they have not enough savings to fall back upon. Farmers have been producing bumper crops for some years now and they were not getting fair prices, thanks to the machinations by middlemen, millers, hoarders and big traders even in normal political environment. Now their plight will be doubly miserable.
Also migrant workers from Bangladesh who have sent record remittance recently in defiance of the popular conjecture, could raise the bar still higher for themselves. The thrust given to manpower export could definitely have figured at the top of the wish list. These are proven areas that have administered a shot in the arm of the country's economy. Political parties involved in pathological bickering have not focused on such issues to tell the nation how they thought they could advance the cause of promoting those. There was need for setting sight on uncharted pastures. In terms of exploring new destinations for manpower export, some progress was made. A few Eastern European countries including Russia could be such destinations. Alongside this, diversification of the exportable could definitely have been a better option. Â
Instead of engaging the nation's attention to such constructive exercises, now Bangladesh is grappling with unsavoury realities arising from negatives that were avoidable in the first place. So the wish lists both for an individual and the people in general have shrunk in today's Bangladesh. It may shrink further with the continuation of anarchy and violence. Its impressive achievements on development indices may be left in shreds. Not a rosy picture for the country.
nilratanhalder2000@yahoo.com)
Curtailed wish list for the year 2014
Nilratan Halder | Published: January 03, 2014 00:00:00 | Updated: November 30, 2024 06:01:00
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