The death of Begum Khaleda Zia yesterday, December 30, is an irreparable loss to the nation at a moment when it is at a critical juncture. In fact, this is no eulogy to her memory to say that Khaleda Zia was the first elected female prime minister of the country or that she was elected prime minist
Eid-ul-Fitr to be celebrated after a day or two depending on the sighting of the moon is a festival of breaking fast. But this apparently simple meaning has its essence ensconced in the month-long religious and spiritual cognition of self purification and enlightenment. Indeed, the observance of si
An importer of around 80 per cent of fertilizers, Bangladesh faces substantial shortfall of the items soon as the supply lines are now caught up in a war, jointly inflicted by the USA and Israel on Iran. The annual demand for various types of fertilizers in the country stands at between 6.2 and 6.5
A project approved in 2020, under which 329 technical schools and colleges were scheduled to be established by December 2024 is a classic case of biting off more than what bureaucracy can chew. A report carried in this newspaper on Sunday last shows the glaring gap between planning and implementati
With Eid-ul-Fitr around the corner, city dwellers have begun leaving the capital to celebrate the largest Muslim festival with their near and dear ones. According to an estimate of the Ministry of Road Transport & Bridges, around 15 to 20 million people will leave Dhaka before Eid. Usually, several
The maiden sitting of the 13th parliament was convened on Thursday after a long and difficult political journey. After fifteen years of authoritarian misrule that reduced successive parliaments to little more than rubber stamps, the country has now returned to a genuinely representative legislature
Of the two main sources of the country's hard currency, migrant workers' remittances constitute the second largest after commodity export earnings. But since the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, Bangladesh's main destination of migrant workers, the Middle Eastern nations, was never under greater threat t
As the new government prepares to unveil its first national budget, it faces a delicate balancing act. On the one hand, there is a natural expectation that the pledges made during the election campaign will be reflected in the fiscal plan. On the other, the realities of available resources and the
Business leaders and policy researchers have expressed their deep concern at the fall of private investment at its lowest in a decade in the fiscal year (FY) 2025. The revelation that such investment plummeted to 22.03 per cent of the gross domestic product (GDP) is hardly surprising considering th
Notwithstanding the government's repeated assurances that there are sufficient reserves of fuel oils in the country, queues at the filling stations are getting longer. Evidently, it is the ongoing war in the Middle East, which is the main source of Bangladesh's imported energy-both oil and Liquefie
