Once the "necessary" condition of political order satisfies foreign investors, shifting to the "sufficient" conditions becomes neither automatic nor uphill. For Bangladesh there is both a domestic and external context involved, but the meat is in the intertwining. Bluntly put, our dilemmas boil down to what brand-names we carry, how we navigate the choppy seas of both global market competition and state-based security considerations, and why our infrastructure portfolio should constantly sift between the adaptive and permanent varieties.
Domestically, brand-name generation is as important as brand-diversification, conveying where our comparative advantage keeps fluctuating to and how we are selling our image abroad. For one full generation, the RMG magic has not only established a robust brand-name, but also sustained its glamour for over one generation (typically 25-30 years for us, that is, the span between entering and leaving the work-force). Its current momentum is enough to predict another decade more of the RMG magic continuing, barring any political upheaval or another Bangladesh emerging in the world (it is unlikely if Myanmar or Vietnam, or even any African contender, can become viable enough in the next 5-10 years).
Yet life begins after the leading industry exhausts itself, when a far broader swathe of our development and future history beg attention. Starting with England's Lancashire mills, every developed country had to have some kind of a textiles springboard in addition to a food industry: as social animals, we all need food and clothes first. Our time in the textiles sun began in the 1980s, and quite a game-changer it became. With food we will be able to hold our own by breaking our backs, a far cry from the 1970s when we broke many a backs to no avail. Other raw materials, like jute, tea, and fish, face more competition now than ever before, from not only other countries but also synthetics; and some, like tea, can no longer supply our own needs to fetch foreign income, a fate awaiting fish and shrimp. Behind those limits lie better news for an upwardly-mobile country like ours: we must lay infrastructures leading in other upscale directions, away from primary and secondary sectors to the tertiary (service-sector training, jobs, and consumerism). The central ones cannot but be educational: future dividends will not be in the farms or factories, since these have been utilised to the fullest and their diminishing returns from increasing competition strongly indicates shifting pastures elsewhere, like classrooms and workshops, where intellectual innovation makes more noise than mechanical (software over hardware).
Fortunately, our education sector is vibrant, and with migrants and expatriates trained abroad, we have been making waves on ICT (information and communications technologies) fronts. As an emergent brand-name, it is of vital interest: if, by our 50th anniversary we are not digitalised enough, we will simply miss the last boat to nirvana, and be abandoned by both corporations and increasingly savvy and cosmopolitan consumers. Better than becoming a permanent low middle-income "basket-case", we need fuel for the onerous climb to a top middle-income position before entertaining high-income aspirations. That is not an easy task. The income difference between the low and top middle-income is ten-fold. It took us half a century to accomplish that, with 1971 being the last year we had a per capita income below $100. If our plan is to enter the high-income bracket by the end of the SDG (Sustainable Development Goals)-tenure in 2030, we better boogey: we need much more than a 7 per cent annual growth-rate; and this cannot come from textiles, food, or other raw materials.
ICT cultivation invites foreign investors at a time when our relative lower-wages plus software-generating brain-power expansion gives us a huge advantage as the supplier of all ICT needs in developed countries. Many of them face a forthcoming demographic Armageddon, and even if they do not, costs of living based upon spiralling wages, salaries, pensions and infrastructural breakdown/maintenance compel them to look abroad for the best prices and talents for their everyday needs. Today these include a cell, laptop, desktop, and software programming, at the least. We have already entered this playing field, and can stand far taller if primary, secondary, and higher education pave the way to post-graduate training elsewhere abroad. Again, power-rivalry or economic competition intervenes: post-graduate training at the commanding institutional heights cannot be dispersed equally everywhere. Choices matter. Since the ICT world has been encrypted in the English language, whether we are comfortable with that or not, it is the direct vehicle to post-graduate destinations presently; and if we muddle our relations with the "northern" countries, we end up short-changing our own future. Our students can learn a lot in China, India, Japan, and the like, but it will be in U.S. or U.K. institutions, versed in English, where pathways must head if we are to glitter.
Shifting to a different arena, SkyPartner Global's recent offer coincided with a silently unfolding arena for much longer, exposing another brand-name for us: our solar-energy capacity. We remain critically energy-dependent, and are poised to becoming even more so. Quick-step responses can arrest this gap (for example, a string of coal-based thermal stations plant the very seeds of decay plaguing many upwardly-mobile countries, with China and India coming to mind instantly), but inflict enormous environmental damages. That would be catastrophic: our future hopes would lose their playground. We will become, like many others, a middle-income cripple. Solar energy promises an alternative, increasingly lucrative export outlet, and a brand-name through its varied applications for a long time to come. These also add, like the ICT brand-name, to the family of necessary future infrastructures, capable of delivering us to the high-income nirvana-land and a full-fledged developed country by mid-century. By then, the corresponding social adjustments and transformations should have taken place: no child marriage, substitution of the servant system, the sewage and pollutant blights either under far stricter controls or eliminated, and peace across the delta between political parties, differently-oriented Islamic believers, and across religious divides, natives and immigrants, and citizens and expatriates.
We have not come so far to give up so easily. Stern challenges were overcome in the darkest 1970s through sheer extensions of our physical resources (as evident in our independence war, then surviving the famine, coups, plots, low-wages, and so forth). Today's challenges demand intellectual weapons: education and innovations. Is the younger generation ready for the pens, pencils, libraries, and classrooms? Before these options used to be expensive and prohibitive; today they face another stubborn opponent in student indifference, bred in part by globalisation and technological changes. In the hustle-bustle of adjusting to them, we could easily miss the entrée of our developmental meal. Nirvana awaits silently, smilingly, across the brook, but only for the intellectually adventurous who refuse to yield. Mid-century Bangladesh will belong to them.
The writer is Professor of International Relations, formerly in Universidad Iberoamerica, Mexico City.
 inv198@hotmail.com
Today\\\'s challenges demand intellectual weapons
Imtiaz A. Hussain concluding his ten-part write-up on \'Infrastructure-building and diplomacy\' | Published: November 06, 2015 00:00:00 | Updated: November 30, 2024 06:01:00
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