Bangladesh

The decline of the Adamjee Jute Mills goes back to as early as 1995, soon after a World Bank-Bangladesh government agreement envisaged wide-ranging changes in the jute sector involving closure, downsizing and privatisation of several mills and retrenchment of their workers. Adamjee's experience has found replication in numerous cases in the manufacturing sector, prompting renewed questions once again about adjustment programmes and who actually constitute its true beneficiaries.

Women Development Workers – Implementing Rural Credit Programmes in Bangladesh by Anne Marie Goetz; Sage Publications, New Delhi, London, 2001; pp 443, Rs 595.

This paper takes a fresh critical look at the evolution of India's family planning programme (FPP) and at its performance and failings. It addresses India's apparently contradictory position of having a pioneering role in the global population control movement and also being branded as a country of 'demographic inertia'. This puzzle is in large part due to a deep contradiction and confusion that has continued from the very beginning to inflict the policy-makers and political leadership, especially about the potential of FPP per se in reducing fertility. A tension between the felt urgency of population control and a stubborn scepticism about the effectiveness of a voluntary FPP in the context of a slow socio-economic transformation, has fed into further confusions and chaos relating to the choice of policy instruments and programme strategy. This is brought into sharper focus by the success story of Bangladesh's family planning programme. The most prominent deficiencies and mistakes of India's family planning programme are, it is argued, related largely to a typical bureaucratic (and perhaps political too) predilections, hazy perceptions about effective strategy, and relatedly a chronic mismatch between expressions of priority and actual fund allocation to FPP, which were confounded by a distinct lack of openness (until very recently) towards the experience and expertise of the international community.

There can be no doubt that not only did the Awami League (AL) leader Sheikh Hasina as prime minister accomplish the difficult task of completing the full term of office, 1996-2001, but brought the country one step further towards consolidating the democratic political process by calling for elections and putting in place the constitutionally mandated caretaker government to oversee them. Not even the fact that for most of these years the opposition Bangladesh National Party (BNP) had stayed out of parliament choosing to pursue politics outside it and often sparking violence can take away that achievement of Hasina. But today after the election, in which her party has been all but routed, if Hasina decides to reject the electoral verdict and keep her promise of boycotting parliament and resorting to extra-parliamentary means of protest, then she will have put roadblocks on the way to achieving the stability so desperately needed to get on with normal governance and law-making.

Jagatpur 1977-97: Poverty and Social Change in Rural Bangladesh by Kamal Siddiqui; The University Press, Dhaka, 2000; pp xxviii + 476, Taka 550.