The New Nation - Internet Edition

GDP growth prospects

AFTER elapse of seven months of the financial year 2007-08, only 31 per cent of the total ADP allocation has been utilised so far. Though by accounting principles there should not be any strict equation between the percentage of expenditure, the real spending and the volume of work done. But the matter being inexact would suggest that an equation has to be drawn. To be precise, by spending 31 per cent of the budgetary allocations around 31 per cent of the development targets have been achieved. That the snail's pace of implementation has made the achievement of targets uncertain is being admitted by the government. It has already taken steps to slash the ADP allocation by 15 percent.

Despite political turmoils, law and order and interruption in aid flow over the years the GDP growth was 6.5 per cent which was commendable. Economists are of the opinion that to be a middle income country within a short period of time an 8 per cent GDP growth without break is necessary. Many of the common pitfalls of development, such as political topsy turvy, labour unrest and donor nuances, were absent over the last three quarters of the current financial year. Moreover, the government being not political one did not have to face exigencies which an elected government has to face.

Good governance, transparency, honesty and accountability are the pronounced principles of the present caretaker government. Achievement of development targets should come first as examples of good governance where the government is lagging behind. The Asian Development Bank (ADB) forecasts 5.6 per cent and World Bank (WB) 6 per cent. If the achievement is not at par with the earlier levels a big gap may be created in the economy which would take many many years to bridge.

Curbing jute sector corruption

THE anti-graft taskforces are reportedly going to launch drives soon against corruption that forced many of the state-owned jute mills to face closure while turning others into losing concerns. The taskforces dealing with graft and serious crimes reportedly have started collecting primary information about former and serving senior officials suspected to be involved in corruption both at the mills and their controlling agency - Bangladesh Jute Mills Corporation (BJMC). The government has initiated inquiries into allegations of corruption against the officials of the jute mills as well as of the corporation.

There has been corruption in the sector since the independence of the country, the adviser for jute reportedly said said adding, 'We have received allegations of corruption against many officials.' The taskforces on their own would look into the allegations of irregularities in the state-owned jute mills and would ask for wealth statements of officials and employees - both retired and serving - of the mills and the corporation. The public sector jute mills across the country had not seen any profit since the 1971 independence, mainly due to all-pervasive corruption and mismanagement. There were as many as 77 state-owned jute mills under the BJMC following the 1972-nationalisation.

Privatisation of the jute mills started in 1983 and the number of state-owned jute mills reduced to 22 by the end of 2006. The world's biggest Adamjee Jute Mills was closed down in 2002 and the sprawling mill area was turned into an export processing zone. The present government laid off eight jute mills in June last year when the finance ministry refused to provide any more funds for running the loss-making units. Last year, the government allocated Tk 150 crore for purchasing raw jute but the finance ministry made the fund conditional to getting rid of four more jute mills in line with global lenders' prescription to reduce the number of public sector entities.

The prospect of election

Shamsuddin Ahmed

The caretaker government seems serious about holding election by December. One may deduce it is under international pressure as well as for a safe-exit from an overheated situation that some tends to describe 'near famine'. Chief Adviser Dr Fakhruddin Ahmed has reassured of holding the election in accordance with roadmap. The Chief Election Commissioner Dr ATM Shamsul Huda is more specific by stating the country will see an elected government running the administration in next January. He has asked the political parties to start selecting honest and efficient candidates for contesting the polls. Army Chief General Moeen U Ahmed who is said to be instrumental in bringing about the 1/11 change also wants election as promised to the nation. Yet doubts loom large in the minds of many.

Arch political rivals BNP and Awami Legue are now united in demanding the release of all political leaders including Khaleda Zia and Sheikh Hasina detained and prosecuted under corruption and extortion charges. Zillur Rahman of Awami League and Khandkar Delwar of BNP holding the aegis of their parties in the absence of the chiefs have publicly committed that they will not take part in election without their own party chief.

Facing trial on corruption charges they are unlikely to be released. In case the two major parties stick to their ground and refuse to take part, the election will not be credible. Thus they can frustrate the government move for holding the polls.

It is said AL and BNP chiefs who alternatively ruled the country and enjoyed all the power and perks for 15 years have now realized their mistakes. Their arrogance, intolerance and lust for power led to the situation that prompted imposition of emergency. Now they have come closer keeping aside rivalry and fight their common opponent to put a squeeze on the army backed caretaker government on plea of protecting democracy, freedom and human rights. Leaders of BNP front organizations have been openly demanding of the party leadership to give them agitating programme. Once emergency is relaxed for electioneering they may take on the common opponent (present government) by fuelling the situation to overheat. Can there be election under a confrontation situation?

The followers of Khaleda have refused to carry out reforms within BNP to make it democratic saying it is an internal mater.

Informed sources said reforms in the political parties would be made mandatory in the proposed election rules. Will the obdurate leadership of the two parties abide by the rules to take part in the election?

Awami League and its allies in the 14-party combine have in their first round of dialogue with the Election Commission strongly demanded ban on politics by religious parties. The obvious target was Jamaat-e-Islami. Added to this, sector commanders of the liberation war have now raised the demand of a commission for trial of war criminals. Again, the target is Jamaat.

Many smell a rat in the move after 37 years of the liberation war. In case the demand is conceded and Jamaat is banned and its leaders are brought to dock on charge of war crimes in deference to the wishes of AL, its allies and the sector commanders' forum, thousands of its workers are likely to go underground. That will be perilous for the nation and election impossible. It will be a folly to underestimate Jamaat.

The caretaker government of Dr Fakhruddin Ahmed is considered by many as too weak to withstand pressures exerted by countries trying to extract benefits. The government has reportedly agreed to extend Chittagong Port facility to India. After agreeing to Dhaka-Kolkata rail service India is seeking container service with the ultimate objective of extracting transit facility to its troubled eastern states. Even the Awami League government that was considered closer to New Delhi did not dare extending such facilities for fear of mass upsurge against the government.

In case the caretaker government gives further concession to India it may face a situation that might go beyond control and put the proposed election in jeopardy.

The apprehension of Maulana Matiur Rahman Nizami that RAW and Mosad are active in turning Bangladesh another Afghanistan may not be wholly untrue.

We are indeed banking on a bumper harvest of the boro crop in about eight weeks to overcome the food crisis. But boro harvest entirely depends on favourable weather. Its main foes are hailstorm and flash flood. Hailstorm for one hour or so before the harvest can raze the crop to the ground and flash flood from the hills across the border may wash away the crop in hours.

This happened many times in the main boro areas of greater Sylhet and Mymensingh districts. If, God for bid, the boro crop cannot be taken home safely the food crisis will deepen when conduct of polling may be difficult, as the entire administration will be put to face up a knee-jerking situation.

Few more words. True political leadership quality is endowed and cannot be gained by practice. Wisdom, vision, sagacity, maneuverability, integrity, sacrifice and tolerance are gifted qualities. The country needs leadership who combines these qualities to steer this impoverished nation to peace, progress and development. Do we see anyone among the lot aspiring to run the government?

Bottom-up approach can quicken development

Omar Sacirbey

Colonisation, war, and natural disasters have wrought havoc upon Bangladesh, but Henry Kissinger and George Harrison, quips Iqbal Quadir of Lexington, did the most damage to the country of his birth. The former US Secretary of State's infamous description of the South Asian nation as an "international basket case" and the former Beatle's legendary Concert for Bangladesh in 1971 saddled the war- and flood-ravaged land with an unshakable reputation as hapless and dependent on handouts for survival.

"That has been very damaging to us," said Quadir, who is the Executive Director of MIT's Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship. "Because the country is a so-called basket case, investment never came to us."

Quadir, 49, doesn't dispute that Bangladesh has its troubles but rejects the notion that Bangladeshis need to be rescued by rich countries.

On the contrary, said Quadir, Bangladeshis are as innovative and hard-working as anyone but until recently have lacked the means to unleash their entrepreneurial spirit and rise from poverty.

He proved it with his own company, GrameenPhone, which became the largest cell phone company in Bangladesh largely by selling its phones on credit to poor rural women who in turn rented phone minutes to neighbours, making money for themselves while providing a public service.

This "bottom-up" approach to development, Quadir believes, can work anywhere in the developing world. At the Legatum Center, he is helping a growing crop of entrepreneurially minded students do for other poor countries what he did for Bangladesh.

Although Quadir has spent most of his life in America and considers himself an American, he values his Bangladeshi roots, knows the country's history, cuisine, and literature, and speaks his native tongue with his children.

"I happen to be Bangladeshi, which is why I had some emotional reason to think about it seriously. I know where the shoe pinches," he said. Nevertheless, Quadir is driven less by Bangladeshi patriotism than sympathy for the poor. "I'm motivated by creating a level playing field for the world so that the weak have a chance."

When Bangladesh revolted against Pakistan in March 1971, Quadir and his family fled his hometown of Jessore to escape the ensuing war and roamed the country until the fighting ended with an independent but devastated nation. A decade later Quadir graduated from Swarthmore College with honors and went on to the Wharton School and then Wall Street, where he earned an investment banker's salary.

But even mighty Wall Street, he learned, was vulnerable to the same obstacles that kept societies like Bangladesh from developing. When his firm's computer network went down one day in 1992, the communications breakdown meant he couldn't do his job. It was then that he realized that people in Bangladesh, with no telephones, faced a similar problem. Quadir spent the next few years cobbling together a consortium of banks, telecoms, and other investors willing to risk money and reputation on his idea of creating a cell phone company that would cater to Bangladesh's rural poor.

If the idea sounds reminiscent of the micro-loan industry pioneered by Muhammad Yunus, who won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for his work, it's because Quadir was partly inspired by his fellow Bangladeshi whose Grameen Bank helped finance GrameenPhone.

While Yunus envisioned poor women using his micro-loans to buy assets such as a cow and then selling the milk for profit, Quadir saw the cell phone as a cow. Today, 11-year-old GrameenPhone counts 16 million subscribers, including 250,000 rural "phone ladies" who rent their phones to millions of others.

While Quadir has no aversion to wealth, he far prefers creating businesses to managing them.

"What drives him is not making money or building a business but solving problems," said Nicholas Sullivan, author of "You Can Hear Me Now," which documents GrameenPhone's rise. "Once he thinks a problem has been solved, he's more driven to go onto the next thing, and apply what he's learned with problem A to problem B."

Quadir gave up his managerial duties at GrameenPhone and in 2001 joined Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government before finding his next cow two years later. Through a Cambridge-based company he calls Emergence BioEnergy Inc., Quadir is helping develop a generator that produces one kilowatt of energy, enough to power 70 energy-efficient light bulbs.

The generator, about half the size of a washing machine, will also have a dehydrator for drying produce and medicinal plants, and runs on cow dung, which Bangladesh has plenty of. Quadir hopes to sell the generators to rural villagers whom he expects will put the machines to entrepreneurial uses.

"There's no magic here - that's how complex economies develop," Quadir said. It's this kind of thinking that convinced Firas Ahmad, a Kennedy School graduate who was taught by Quadir, to pass up several secure and high-paying consulting jobs and work for his former teacher at his unusual energy start-up.

"He had a completely different way of teaching and looking at problems. Most of the classes at the Kennedy School were based on doing problem sets, homework, and reading," said Ahmad, a Pakistani-American. "But his was based on totally changing the way you think about a problem." Critics argue that micro-finance and entrepreneur training have done little to lower poverty, and that investment should go into factories that employ many people. Factories have a role in development, Quadir agrees, but that makes little sense in rural areas, where people are dispersed and transportation is difficult.

Despite the skeptics, Quadir and his handful of Legatum colleagues have attracted a new generation of bottom-up believers. In one recent class, students presented business plans for socially responsible yet profit-minded projects. One team was developing a cellphone that could detect cataracts and send the diagnoses to otherwise out-of-reach hospitals. Another aspiring entrepreneur laid out her plans for an inexpensive motel chain for Kazakhstan, where lodging-less highways force travelers to spend nights in their cars.

As entrepreneurship and development become increasingly intertwined, Quadir is cautiously optimistic that, along with technology, they can be used to reduce poverty.

"I think it's possible to have technologies that empower individuals, from a business point of view. That's the Western value that we should spread," he said. "The best way poor people can come out of their poverty is to get on the global highway, not on some dirt side road."

(Influential US daily Boston Globe published this article on the eve the Independence Day of Bangladesh 24.03.08).

Counter-measures needed for image building

Dr.Abdul Ruff

The Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), the second largest inter-governmental organization after the UN which has membership of 57 states spread over four continents, has slammed the trend of Islamophobia prevailing the world over at its 11th Session of the Islamic Summit held in the Senegalese capital Dakar on March 13-14. The Organization called on Europe and America to take stronger measures against 'Islamophobia' in a report prepared for a summit of the group's 57 members in Dakar and warned that an "alarming" rise in anti-Islamic insults and attacks in the West has become a threat to international security. This monitoring group expects that Europe and North America to do more, through laws and social action, to protect Muslims from threats and discrimination and prevent insults against Islam's religious symbols.

The report the OIC has prepared has added that Muslims in many parts of the world, in the West in particular, are being stereotyped, profiled and subjected to various forms of discriminatory treatment. It called on OIC member states to "step up their counter-measures by keeping the pressure on the international community at multilateral and bilateral forums." The OIC said the Muslim world must launch a campaign to show that it is a "moderate, peaceful and tolerant" religion, closely monitor and the raise the alert over anti-Islamic incidents and organize more inter-faith initiatives. Victims of Islamophobia must be encouraged and given necessary help to file complaints.

The message from Dakar is loud and clear: when the West behaves well, the rest of the world would follow suit. They acknowledge that many Muslim countries are themselves victims of terror and active partners of the international community in combating terror and extremism.

Also, OIC seeks to see a peaceful global atmosphere emerging to replace the existing zones of conflicts. The Secretary General of the Organization Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu also welcomed the signing of an agreement between President Omar Hassan Al Bashir and President Idriss Deby, President of the Republic of Chad, under the auspices of Maitre Abdoulaye Wade, President of the Republic of Senegal, on the sidelines of the 11th Session of the Islamic Summit Conference, on 13 March 2008. Ihsanoglu praised the commendable efforts made by Maitre Abdoulaye Wade, President of the Republic of Senegal, whose outcome was the realization of this Agreement, and expressed his hope that this Agreement would permanently end the differences between the two countries and establish peace and security in the region. The OIC is the collective voice of the Muslim world and ensuring to safeguard and project the interests of the Muslim world in the spirit of promoting international peace and harmony among various people of the world.

The Organization was established upon a decision of the historical summit which took place in Rabat, Kingdom of Morocco in September 1969 as a result of criminal arson of Al-Aqsa Mosque in occupied Jerusalem. In 1970 the first ever meeting of Islamic Conference of Foreign Minister (ICFM) was held in Jeddah which decided to establish a permanent secretariat in Jeddah headed by the organization's secretary general. Prof Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu is the 9th Secretary General who assumed the office in January 2005 after being elected by the 31st ICFM.

Professor Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu was re-elected for a new term of office during the closing meeting of the 11th Session of the Islamic Summit Conference held at Dakar on March 14. The new Charter sets the new term of office for OIC Secretary General at five years instead of four years. The incumbent Secretary General has one year remaining in office thereby bringing the overall length of his term to six years.

The OIC, however, once again failed to draw parallels between state-sponsored terrorist activities in the West and those in East, for example in Indian occupied Kashmir, where the Indian terrorist forces kill and torture Kashmiris and also branded them as "terrorists" because they violently have reacted to the systematic Indian terror attacks. I would be in the interests of Islam and Muslims globally, even for peaceful co-existence between different religions, if the Islamic nations take a common stand on an-Islamic terrorism across the globe and take corrective measures to make those who pursue anti-Islamic agenda as a primary domestic and foreign policy agenda.

There is no point in beating about the bushes by taking only select problems being faced by Muslims in part of the world. Kashmir was an independent country before Indian tactfully annexed it in 1947, immediately after Indian got its independence from UK.Islam, unlike many other religions, strictly adheres to prayers being offered in a totally peaceful atmosphere and in complete silence signifying voluntary surrender to Almighty and it cannot be a religion that would promote violence and terrorism, as propagated by the West. Rather Islam preaches and follows a peaceful propagation of the tents of the religion and peaceful co-existence right from the days of the Prophet Mohammad (SAS). However, there have been a lot of ill-influences from other streams of ways of life on Muslims world over and they behave some what irrationally.

Muslims have not fully gauged the undercurrents in the Islamophobia, however. The world powers pursuing an invert anti-Islamic agenda have conspired to provoke Muslims to violently react to state-sponsored- terrorist actions of the powers that be. Islam had faced constant attacks since it the religion came into existence.

The summit noted: "but in recent years the phenomenon has assumed alarming proportions and has become a major cause of concern for the Muslim world." The anti-Islamic forces, cutting across their religious contours and variations join together to use the occasion to denounce Islam and insult Muslims and try to finish off Islam by engineering conversions to other religions, have been at work for ages.

But the Sept 11 event in the USA has been used by all the anti-Islamic forces to slam Islam and torture and kill Muslims, all over the world. The Muslim nations have been watching the show, unaware of what is exactly happening to them. The civilized world, the West, has been in the forefront in this evil practice of fictional threat projecting Islam as a terror and evil, known as Islamophobia, encouraging anti-Islamic nations like India also to do their part of evil in a sustained manner.

In a recent State report, the US has slammed India for human rights record, saying it faces evasion of basic human rights, numerous serious problems including extra-judicial killings, disappearances, and torture and rape by security forces in Kashmir though it has deliberately not mentioned the Muslims.

The report said in India 'serious internal conflicts affected the state of Jammu and Kashmir, as well as several states in the north and east. There were several instances in which some elements of the security forces acted independently of government authority, it said. Attacks against religious minorities and the promulgation of anti-religious conversion laws were concerns. OIC should consider the morale of the report quite seriously.

There has been a growing trend not only in the non/anti-Islamic nations, but even in Muslim nations to use the Islamophobia plank to terrorize the Muslims. OIC should also alert the member-states about such nefarious activities against Muslims.