Ownership changes in RMG and other sectors

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The ownership of units in the country's readymade garment (RMG) industry is reportedly changing hands in a greater number of cases than before. A number of garments industries that have been laid off recently from labour troubles are also likely to be similarly sold to foreign investors.
In all appearances, the country's otherwise most successful industry does now seem to be up for ownership-changes. Some deliberate instigation of workers in the garments industries by non-workers or outsiders was earlier witnessed in a good number of places. A process of takeover of many such garments industries has, thus, followed now, as their owners feel too stressed in running them.
Many people consider this situation as the deliberate fomenting of troubles in RMG units in a good number of cases to create such conditions of lawlessness and inoperability so that the owners do feel themselves persuaded to sell the industries off as a better option than clinging on to them. And it is bloody smart.
Private owners are certainly free to sell off their properties to whosever they like. Nobody can say anything against it. But the situation would have strong reasons to be reviewed differently, if the buyers turn out to be the main actors behind the wings fuelling the troubles in the garments industries so that the owners at one point in desperation take the decision to sell off.
There would be nothing objectionable in the process but for the fact that its gathering of force would mean the loss of 'national ownership' of an industry that had been indigenously owned and built up very painstakingly over the last thirty nine years, if the buyers happen to be not local ones in good many ownership-change cases.
Not only in the garments sector, signs and symptoms are there that the stage is being gradually set for "foreign" takeover in some vital sectors as well. Specially in the transport and communication sector or in areas of related infrastructures for this sector, the ground is, thus, reportedly being paved for large scale external inroads on the plea of building regional connectivity for helping greater intra-regional trade. But practically Bangladesh could find its roads and transportational infrastructures largely owned and operated by non-Bangladeshis to serve own extraneous business interests, if this process deepens. Bangladesh's own national economic gains from such developments could be peripheral at best.
Mahatabuddin Ahmed
Kabi Jasimuddin Road
Kamalapur, Dhaka