10 years from now we are going to regret what we missed out on. What a waste! Must read piece called highway robbery

Basically, Bangladesh’s objection to Indian transit calls into question our involvement in the entire Asian Highway project, which is premised on the benefits of opening up transportation networks transnationally, and if we do not resolve our issues with granting India transit rights, the network will eventually simply bypass us, and we will be left on the outside permanently.

The bottom line is that the current administration’s short-sightedness and amateurish grasp of economics and international affairs has completely derailed our involvement in a project with unlimited potential for the national good, and has the added detriment of making us look ridiculous in the eyes of the world due to our backward thinking.

Nice work, guys.

and there are thousands of other examples. The recent WTO fiasco, tax on sim cards to name a few.

Policy making in Bangladesh is littered with examples of similar imbecility. Sadly, the political debate in the country almost never focuses on such issues, but rather on issues such as who declared independence, and now who is to blame for the terrorist threat.

This is not to say that these are not important issues that have their place and need to be debated. The rise of religious extremism, especially, is an issue that urgently needs to be discussed in the political arena right now.

But the inevitable casualty of focusing on such issues to the exclusion of all others is coherent and cogent economic policy that is well thought-out and enacted in the public interest. One could argue that it is this neglect of hard policy debate that has in large part contributed to Bangladesh’s relatively anemic development and the stubborn resilience of the various social and economic problems that we face as a nation.

We are simply not having the kinds of policy debates that the country needs, and as a result the policies that are ultimately enacted are largely ad hoc, not well thought-out, and often bad for the country, with little or no fall-out for those who enact them.

It is imperative to shift the focus of debate in this country from abstruse issues such as who declared independence to debating a policy agenda that would govern how we address the challenges faced by the nation.

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