Traffic mobility in Dhaka City has long been a cause for concern. It has an average speed of 4.8 to 6.4 kilometre per hour--- almost same as the walking speed. Due to this slow speed of vehicles on city roads, the annual loss in productivity stands approximately at $6.5 billion. The problems are kn
Almost a decade ago, Bangladesh Railway launched a 30-year master plan to expand rail coverage to all 64 districts of the country and modernise its services. The master plan included a total of 230 projects scheduled to be implemented by 2045 in six phases at a cost of Taka 5.53 trillion. As
As high as 62 per cent of Bangladesh population lives in the countryside. Strangely, 75 per cent of its doctors and nurses serve the urban residents, who make up only 38 per cent of the population. Evidently, the statistics provided by Bangladesh 'Health Workforce Strategy 2024' of the Ministry of
When investment in the industrial sector is hard to come by, asking for outlays for revival of sick or closed state-owned enterprises (SOEs) sounds rather paradoxical. Time and again, such initiatives have caused waste of funds. The reason why such moves have ended in failures is more political tha
The country's banking sector continues to make screaming headlines. Recent media reports inform that, by the end of 2025, distressed loans across all scheduled banks had surged by more than 47 per cent to Tk 10.08 trillion --- an amount that exceeds the size of the proposed national budget for the
Transport reform has been promised so often in Bangladesh that new announcements are usually met with more scepticism than enthusiasm. The government's latest plan, centred on route-based uniform bus services and a renewed push for electric vehicles, contains many of the elements that a sound trans
Infections from measles and suspected measles leading to severe cases, hospitalisation and even deaths have been showing no sign of abating despite the government's claim to the contrary that its special nationwide Measles-Rubella (MR) vaccination campaign plus the ongoing routine EPI has achieved
The latest figures of distressed loans in the country's banking sector paint a deeply troubling picture of a financial system struggling under the weight of accumulated weaknesses. A sharp rise in distressed assets is not merely a banking-sector concern; it is a matter of national economic signific
Traffic congestion in Dhaka has become so severe that it wastes a major portion of the working hours of the commuters. Depending on the distance between their houses and workplaces, they need to start commuting much earlier than they would require in a normal traffic ecosystem. Many of them need to
Bangladesh's revenue collection has grown more slowly than the economy over the past decade. That means, though the economy has expanded significantly, the tax system has failed to capture the newly generated wealth. Overreliance on manual processes, paper-based auditing and fragmented digita
