The New Nation - Internet Edition

Business leaders’ voices

THE government as part of its on going dialogue with political parties and representative sections of the population, held parleys with the top business leaders on Tuesday. The business leaders who were present at these talks represented the community. They can be truly regarded as spokesmen for the business class of the country. Business owners and operators are the ones who run the wheels of the economy. They are the ones who solve the bread and butter issues of people through their income and job creation.

They also keep the government going by helping generate revenue. Thus, their voices eminently deserve to be heard and their meritorious suggestions need to be considered. What the business leaders said in their dialogue with the government, were down to earth things. They underlined that democratic governance of the country through elections at the fastest must be aimed at by everybody. They also underscored at the same time that the post-election situation must not lead to a relapse into the same sort of political sickness with adverse effects on the economy, as were experienced in the past.

The business leaders articulated the point with a lot of force and pleaded that political parties must discard their old ways by initiating their own in-house reforms before the election, they should create hope among people that the winners of the elections would ensure good governance. Indeed, like the common people, the business entities have a lot at stake in securing the future of the country. Political stability and good governance best guarantee their successful entrepreneurship for the health of the economy. It is hoped that the persuasive words of the business community would get due weightage from the political parties and their leaders in the best interest of the country.

Protecting insurance clients

MANY people do not have a very good impression about insurance companies and their agents. This facet of the reality has been reflected in the observation of a highly placed official of the government. The commerce secretary brought a number of serious allegations against insurance companies while he was speaking at an award giving ceremony of the Bangladesh Insurance Executive Club (BIEC) in the city the other day. He came down heavily on some companies for violating the insurance rules and code of conduct and playing foul with the clients. Insurance is a matter of trust. People open insurance policies with the expectation of a secured future. But when the companies make breach of trust people lose confidence in them.

The most serious allegation against them is that they follow a complicated and lengthy process in settling claims of policy holders. Insurance agents sometimes collect premiums from the clients but do not deposit money to the company accounts.

Due to such flagrant violation of business ethics and breach of trust people turn their faces away from the insurance companies and find out alternatives where possible. In the life insurance sector, people are usually found to prefer a foreign company instead of the local ones. The insurance companies must think over the image crisis that they themselves have created and must regain the lost confidence.

However, the commerce secretary was not without a praise for the insurance companies for the role they are playing in economic development, industrialization, agricultural development, rural poverty reduction and employment generation. Last year the insurance companies invested Tk 5,800 crore in different sectors including real estate and the stock market. They are also contributing to the rural economy by bringing rural poor under micro-insurance coverage. They can do more if they adhere to business norms and ethics.

A pro-people transport plan for Dhaka

Eng. Ziaur Rahman

Day by day the number of private cars increases in Dhaka City. This is fuelled by the fact that the private cars have been given priority in transport planning. More private cars, however, means more pollution, both noise and air. Not only does a car dependent transport system hurt the environment; it also uses up a lot of fuel, making our economy heavily fuel dependent. Transport planning that focuses on private cars benefit only a tiny portion of the population while making it harder for the majority to get around. If the current transport plan is implemented about 80% of the population will be neglected. For the 80% of the population that will be left out of the current transport plan one would need to develop pedestrian, fuel-free transport, and public transport infrastructure. For these we need to combine city planning with transport planning. Neighborhoods should contain everything needed for daily life such as, schools, jobs, shops, hospitals and entertainment. This would reduce the number of long trips between neighborhoods and lessen the volume of traffic on the roads. The short trips that would be needed within the neighborhoods walking and cycle rickshaws should suffice and if the infrastructure is improved it would increase speed and safety. For long distance travel out public transport must be developed. It is very necessary to control the number of private cars in order to create a better transport system as well as creating a more livable city. The Strategic Transport Plan (STP) for Dhaka must take pedestrians, fuel- free transport, inclusive neighborhoods and public transport into consideration in order to create a just transport system for all.

The current transport plan encompassing the next 20 years, that is about to be approved, needs to be revised taking some of the before mentioned problems into consideration. The proposed STP for· Dhaka, if implemented, would only increase travel time and transport costs, pollution and fuel dependency, infrastructure and maintenance costs.

The STP proposes 11 options to solve the current and future transport problems in Dhaka. The sixth option was chosen. This option includes constructing a metro rail system, a bypass, Bus Rapid Transit (BRT). The question is why the option ranking sixth was chosen, while the first five were rejected. If one is not to follow the outcome of a detailed evaluation, but rather to introduce new terms on which the decision was supposedly made, then what is the point of a detailed evaluation in the first place?

Further questions arise. A decision had previously been made to approve a 6,000 crore Metro rail project. Now a second decision has been made to approve a 23,000 crore Metro rail project. Why the two projects? And why such large expenditures for Metro when it is anticipated that relatively few passengers will use it? While public transit is undoubtedly important, a surface system would cost about 100 times less per kilometer, allowing for both lower cost and a far more extensive system. Further, if pedestrians are, as STP claims, to be given priority, why is there almost no expenditure and no plans for improving the situation for pedestrians-without whom, in any case, a Metro rail cannot function, as people must be able to reach the Metro stops in the first place.

Research shows that if we invest in more roads all the problems associated with them, pollution, noise, fuel dependency, and traffic congestion will only increase. In proposal number 6, 3 elevated road ways are to be built at a cost of 614 million US dollars, an increased expenditure of 64% over option 1. We spend 64% more and get only more problems with traffic congestion and the environment. All 11 STP options claim to put pedestrians first but they only allocate 0.24% of the budget to pedestrian facilities. This is a tiny amount of money for a transport mode that is supposedly to get special consideration. The STP also claims that a waterway would be an environmentally friendly way to transport goods around Dhaka, but they only budget 1.11 % towards the building of such a waterway. Similarly 34% of trips in Dhaka are made by fuel-free transport but they only budget 0.44% to building up this transport mode. STP praises pedestrians, waterways and fuel-free transport as great modes of transport, yet allocates them next to nothing in all of their proposals. Their importance should be reflected in the amount of money allocated but sadly it is not.

The Bangladesh Railway should play a major role in the transport sector of Dhaka. Its ability to move large numbers of people cheaply and fuel efficiently is a major plus to any transport plan. The STP proposal 6, suggest moving the main railway station, Karmalapur, to the outskirts of Dhaka City. This would only increase the traffic problems in Dhaka City because instead of taking the train all the way to the heart of the city, the many train passengers coming to Dhaka from other cities, would have to take road transport from the outskirts into the heart of the city. The road transport would increase the pollution in Dhaka City as well as the travel costs of the passengers. In a report of the Dhaka Urban Transport Project (DUTP) showed that a rickshaw-ban on Mirpur Road decreased public transport movement along the road by 26%. Yet they claim that they banned rickshaws in order to increase the mobility of public transport. After the implementation of the DUTP, the economy of the Mirpur Road corridor lost 700 million Taka per year due to wasted time sitting in traffic. This figure does not include the money spent on wasted fuel a or the environmental costs of burning so much fuel, which would be another 1.5 billion Taka.

Before the STP proposal gets approved, we request the government to take steps to implement demand management and mixed use neighbourhoods. Also we request that the transport planning is not focused on cars but rather people. We would like to reiterate that Dhaka City should develop pedestrian, rickshaw, bicycle and public transport infrastructure. We also hope that facilities are created outside of Dhaka to alleviate the burden placed on the Dhaka City transportation system by people traveling to Dhaka for health care, education etc.

Impacts of seal level rise on Bangladesh

Rajesh Sarker

Climate change is an important issue nowadays. Various human activities are making the world hot to hotter. The ultimate result is global warming, i.e. climate change. Rising temperature in the atmosphere causes sea level rise and affects low lying coastal areas and deltas of the world. In 1990, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that with a business-as-usual scenario of greenhouse gas emission, the world would be 3.3 C warmer by the end of the next century, with a range of uncertainty of 2.2 to 4.9 C (Warrick et al., 1993). With rise in temperature, sea level will rise because of thermal expansion and ice melt.

Sea level rise has various impacts on Bangladesh, a coastal country facing 710 km long coast to the Bay of Bengal. It already has affected Bangladesh by land erosion, salinity intrusion and loss in biodiversity. Its potential threats are coming even strongly in the future. Sea level rise will cause river bank erosion, salinity intrusion, flood, damage to infrastructures, crop failure, fisheries destruction, loss of biodiversity, etc. along this coast.

Due to various human activities, carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases are accumulated in the earth's atmosphere, resulting in climate change. Rising temperature expand the ocean volume in two ways. Firstly, it melts mass volume of ice of the polar region and secondly, it causes thermal expansion of water of the ocean. Wigley and Raper (1987) comment that the relative contributions of thermal expansion and ice melting to this sea level rise are uncertain and estimates vary widely, from a small expansion effect through roughly equal roles for expansion and ice melting to a dominant expansion effect. These two factors increase volume of ocean water of the earth and rise in the sea level.

1. The main impacts of sea level rise on water resources are fresh water availability reduction by salinity intrusion. Both water and soil salinity along the coast will be increased with the rise in sea level, destroying normal characteristics of coastal soil and water.

2. Sea level rise would change the location of the river estuary, causing a great change in fish habitat and breeding ground. Penaid prawns breed and develop in brackish water, where salt water and fresh water mix. Sea level rise would turn this interface backward, changing habitat of prawn.

3. Salinity intrusion due to sea level rise will decrease agricultural production by unavailability of fresh water and soil degradation. Salinity also decreases the terminative energy and germination rate of some plants (Rashid et a!., 2004; Ashraf et a!., 2002). Ali (2005) investigated the loss of rice production in a village of Satkhira district and found that rice production in 2003 was 1,151 metric tons less than the year 1985, corresponding to a loss of 69 per cent. Out of the total decreased production, 77 per cent was due to conversion of rice field into shrimp pond and 23 per cent was because of yield loss

4. The SLR will inflict its impacts on Bangladesh in the coastal area and through the coastal area, on the whole of Bangladesh. About 2,500,8,000 and 14,000 km of land (with a corresponding percentage of2%, 5% and 10% with respect to the total land area of the country) will be lost due to SLR of O.lm, 0.3m and 10m respectively (Ali, 2000). The potential land loss estimated by IPCC (2001) is even worse. It reports 29,846 sq. km area of land will be lost and 14.8 million people will be landless by I-m SLR. (Figure-II & 12) Land loss leads to loss of agricultural land, loss of homestead, loss of road and other communication infrastructure and above of loss of wide range of biodiversity. One of the major causes of land loss is erosion.

5. Bangladesh is one of the salt producing countries of the world. Cox's Bazar coast of Bangladesh coastline is suitable for salt production. About 19,670 ha area has been used for salt production along the Cox's Bazar coast of the country. There are 216 salt pans, having an area of 8,153 ha only in Chakaria and Cox's Bazar Sadar thana of the district, producing 175,030 metric tons of salt annually (Hossain and Lin, 2001, p.19). This coastal industry is fully influenced by sea water and its level.

A one metre sea level rise will inundate all the salt fields and will ruin the sectors. Salt farmers can't move upwards land for the purpose because, physical properties of the soil of the present salt field will not move backwards with sea level rise. About 20 million people are directly or indirectly related in salt production (Hossain and Lin, 2001, p.20) and! or trading in Bangladesh. Sea level rise, by inundating salt fields will force this huge number of people to be unemployed. This large population will try to find alternative profession, which is very hard or even impossible, in the case of present situation of Bangladesh.

6. All the tourist facilities in the coastal zone will be affected by sea level rise directly or indirectly. Tourism sector of Kuaka will suffer the most because all the facilities are very close to the coastline and the area is more vulnerable

Comparative to Cox's Bazar and Chittagong. However, all the mentioned areas are highly vulnerable in terms of sea level rise related natural disaster, e.g. flood, storm surge, etc.

7. Sea level rise may increase the risk of health hazards like diarrhoea, cholera, etc. Cholera is an infectious disease of the small intestine of human beings and is common in the coastal area of Bangladesh.

Water salinity of the coastal area of Bangladesh varies from 0 ppt to 20 ppt .Water salinity and its distribution in the coastal area are increasing with the increase of sea level rise (Faisal & Parveen, 2004; Alam, 2003; IPCC, 2001a; World Bank, 2000). With the increased density and distribution of salinity, cholera germs are getting favourable habitat and spreading in the coastal area.

8. The Sundarbans will be completely lost with 1 metre sea level rise (World Bank, 2000, p.63). Loss of the Sundarbans means great loss of heritage, loss of biodiversity, loss of fisheries resources, loss of life and livelihood and after all loss of very high productive ecosystem. Area of the Sundarbans, inundated by different scale of sea level rise.

9. Sea level rise, by reducing fresh water availability, reducing fisheries and agricultural production, eroding coastal land, losing biodiversity and by causing health hazards ,creates a danger situation for the people of Bangladesh. Again, 'most important to survival and well-being' is the basic needs of human being.

Table: Impacts of sea level rise on the basic needs of the people of Bangladesh

Basic needs. How sea level rise affects it

Food. Rise in sea level would flood agricultural lowlands and deltas in parts of Bangladesh (Miller, 2004; Bennett et al, 1991) that will decrease food production, causing shortage of food. Only salinity intrusion due to sea level rise will reduce 0.2 million metric ton of rice production (WB, 2000).

Cloths: Sea level rise will increase poverty. Increased poverty will decrease cloths buying capacity of the people of Bangladesh.

Housing: In Bangladesh, 29,846 sq. km. area of land, will be lost and 14.8 million people will be landless by sea level rise (IPCC, 2001a), losing their house.

Health: Sea level rise by extending coastal area and by increasing salinity in the area will increase the risk of cholera. It will accelerate flood intensity facilitating transmission of diarrheal disease (World Bank, 2000).

Education: Sea level rise will cause destruction of infrastructure including educational institutes. Besides, students of flood, or other sea level rise affected family will leave School College, in search of work to support their family.

Food, clothing, housing, health and education are the basic needs of the people of Bangladesh. Table-8 explains how sea level rise affects the basic needs of large number of people of the country. Affecting basic needs, sea level rise becomes a threat to food security and other well-being securities .

Many of these people have been displaced from their homes in recent decades becoming 'ecological refugees'. Sea level rise will create such ecological or environmental refugees in the country, forming 'ecological marginalisation' (Homer-Dixon, 1998). Barnett (2003) states, 5.5 million people living on the Ganges delta in Bangladesh who will be forced to relocate with a 45 cm rise in sea level may seek to move inland within Bangladesh, but a significant number may seek to move to India and Pakistan-and previous migration of this kind has been a factor in violence in the region.

Sea level rise induced environmental refugees may trigger the conflict. Nowadays 'Push back' is common news in Bangladeshi newspapers that means pushing Bengali speaking people from 'India to Bangladesh by Indian Border Security Force (BSF). Environmental refugees created by sea level rise will cause even worse situation that may trigger conflict between the two countries. Thus, sea level rise might be a threat to national security of Bangladesh.

Opinion: Category of untruth

Sheikh Rakib Uddin

What is truth? Truth is absolutely an established correct state of condition to be strictly obeyed by all in the society. Everyone in the society should refrain from making falsehood. It is easier to differentiate right thing from wrong, one as light could easily be determined from darkness. Truth is a fact like broad day light. Truth is subjective but in many cases more visible and be better guessed than objective one. It is not only duty but ethical obligation for anyone to tell the truth. Any attempt to conceal the truth is an offence taken into cognisance by any court of law anywhere. No divine book neither asks nor encourages directly or indirectly to choose wrong path in discharging duties for the sake of the world or the world hereafter. All the prophets speak in the same tune not to commit sin by telling the untruth. All the philosophers from Thales of Mitetus in Greece in the 6th century BC down to the present globalisation ages teach always to avoid untruth to be awarded with divine blessings.

It is the first and foremost duty of a newsman to publish, broadcast and telecast objective information carrying facts, a teacher to teach absolutely and correct subjects based on knowledge both in scale and value, a politician should guide the nation to a right path in all state of affairs, a lawyer must deal with facts and correct figures in arguments in the courts to help judge or judges deliver neutral judgment, a judge sitting on a chair of justice must pronounce verdict upholding the truth and an official both in public and private sectors for the sake of the truth under no circumstances will misuse powers in well defined works and function, a trader must avoid any kind of unfair means that breaks the truth and denies the honesty, causing illogical sufferings to the people. Mixture of truth and untruth is more dangerous- nothing could be more than this to cheat. Fluttering, unfounded hopes, propaganda and false qualification and commitment fall in category of untruth. Knowledge of truth and belief of trust bring sovereign good of human nature. In the society there is no minimum scope for anybody to be monarchs or rulers to remain away from truth even for a signle moment.

To conclude, I deem fit to quote from Francis Bacon "The first creature of God in the works was the light of sense, the last was the light of reason and his Sabbath work ever since is the illumination of His spirit. Bacon continues. It is pleasure to stand upon the shore and to see ships tossed upon the sea, a pleasure to stand in the window of a castle and to see a battle and the adventure thereof below but no pleasure is comparable to the standing upon the vantage ground of truth. Exercise of untruth not only handicaps welfare but also is the root of all corruption, miseries, anarchy and unhappiness in the society. If one wants beauty must uphold the truth in your deeds and manners in letter and spirit. Truth will bring victory ultimately while works devoid of truth sure destruction.