New Year priorities

The dawning of a new year is always special to a people or peoples because it marks a cycle of life in relation to time. But a year is either the completion of the orbit of the planet Earth around the Sun or the 12 cycles – each called a lunation – the Moon completes. There was, however, another variation of a 19-year lunar cycle developed by Greek astronomer Meton in 400 B.C., which corresponds to the solar calendar. Essentially, a year is a result of definitions of time civilisations have come up with. Thus the Gregorian calendar now followed in 168 countries is the most accepted version in today's world. Although many cultures use their lunar or variants of solar calendars for religious and cultural occasions for tradition's sake, they also follow the Gregorian calendar for official purposes.
Clearly, the New Year's Day on the most widely followed calendar also provides for the highly spectacular and popular celebrations across the globe. While the nations ahead in time zones such as Kribati, Chatham Island, New Zealand, Fiji, Australia, Japan and South Korea, China, the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand and Myanmar welcome the New Year on Sunday ahead of others, the rest of the world starts doing so on Monday. Remarkably, it starts with Bangladesh. Now the question is, how the wider world and more particularly this nation, now at a crossroads, are bracing for challenges facing them. Two phenomena – one natural and the other mostly manmade – the world is going to inherit as undesirable legacies from the previous year. These are the rise in global temperature and wars in Ukraine and Gaza. If climate change has put weather everywhere in turmoil, threatening liveability and livelihoods of nations, especially in developing countries, the war in Ukraine has already wreaked havoc with smaller economies including that of Bangladesh. If the Gaza war escalates regionally, its repercussions will be doubly telling for those economies.
The combined aftershock of Covid-19 and Ukraine war has already sent the least developed and developing nations reeling with raging inflation and depreciation of local currency against US dollar dealing savage blows to their soft underbellies. Bangladesh finds itself at the receiving end. Is there any sign it can overcome the shock in the year 2024? The country has shown enough resilience in the past to tide over economic and political crises. It has made phenomenal progress and developed some spectacular infrastructure. But this time, neither the world is at peace with itself nor has the country got its priority right. Misgovernance in the banking sector has been responsible for swelling of non-performing loans to Tk1.56 trillion, a large portion of which has been laundered abroad.
The New Year's top socio-economic agenda, therefore, should be to recover the embezzled money and devise programmes for narrowing the yawning disparities in society with accumulation of wealth in a few hands to the deprivation of the majority of their share in national income. Can the government coming to power after the January 7 election make it a landmark year for prioritising the agenda of bringing down the irrational social inequality and inflation? On the economic front, other pressing issues are debt servicing and maintaining forex reserve. Putting the new education curricula in perspective, stemming brain drain and promoting healthy culture, games and sports also make the list of top agenda. These are essential for setting the record straight in the light of the spirit of the country's War of Liberation and also as a deterrent to the pervasive degeneration such as drug abuse, sex crimes and fraudulent practices. Happy New Year to all.