Habibullah N Karim

That Bangladesh is a growth superstar of Asia looms large in any global economic forum, be it the World Economic Forum or the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific. This sustained growth has been largely fuelled by the government’s unapologetic push for digitising all government services to citizens, building an ecosystem for technology startups and incentivising the ICT services industry over the last decade and a half.

A cheap solution has been around for decades

In this digital lifestyle, the demarcation between the physical and the virtual has become fuzzy and transmutable.

For other sectors to expand as much as RMG has, they must be given better policy support.

It is disheartening to see that Bangladesh couldn’t find a place in the top third of the ranking in this very telling study.

The onset of the Coronavirus pandemic at the beginning of the year 2020 has affected human civilisation like no other since the Spanish Flu pandemic exactly a hundred years ago.

In the last one year the coronavirus pandemic has infected more than a hundred million and killed more than two million people around the globe—the pandemic is not yet done.

We are brought into this world by our mothers with whom we have an inseparable “biome” connection.

The novel coronavirus started to expand into all corners of the globe from the very beginning of this calendar year, as the whole wide world watched the silent spread of the contagion from those affected in Wuhan, China—the origin of the scourge—and then from returning nationals in various parts of the world.

There is an old saying that “what does not kill you makes you stronger”.

In the last four months, the country has been swept up in the shadowy spectre of the coronavirus, snuffing the life out of our near and dear ones before their time. Lockdowns, sanitisers, face masks and social distancing have dominated public discourses of late.

The passing of National Professor Jamilur Reza Choudhury marks the sudden end of the extraordinary journey of a man who was venerated by thousands of his direct students at Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (Buet), Brac University and University of Asia Pacific as well as thousands more, who came in touch with him through his professional and pro-bono engagements in diverse fields, to whom he was a quintessential teacher, mentor and philosopher-guide.

On Wednesday, the World Health Organization (WHO) formally declared the COVID-19 outbreak a “pandemic”. With three confirmed cases of the latest strain of the coronavirus, aka COVID-19, diagnosed on March 7 by the Institute of Epidemiology,

The year 2020 marks the beginning of a new decade that is pregnant with a plethora of transformative possibilities with anything from artificial intelligence, bio-engineering, distributed ledger or blockchain and genetics to predictive healthcare, quantum computing, re-usable rockets and virtual reality; the world as we knew in the last couple of decades is destined to transform right before our eyes in leaps and bounds.

Late Chief Justice Habibur Rahman traced the origin of Bangladesh as a land that was referred to as “Gangaridai” in Greek travel lore of pre-Christian era known for its untold riches and easy living.

Blockchain technology has been all the rage of late from Azkaban to Zurich, from magical realms to the real world.

Like any other developing nation, Bangladesh puts a lot of emphasis on foreign direct investment (FDI) as a vehicle of growth for jobs, technical know-how and gross domestic product (GDP).

The Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has issued its latest warning saying that the world’s oceans are rising twice as fast as they did in the last century due to fast-disappearing ice-sheets in the Antarctic and Greenland.

In 1994, the country had around half a dozen public universities and zero private ones. A quarter of a century later, we now have 135 universities—a large majority of which are private. This growth in the number of tertiary-level educational institutions is certainly a

A mere 25 years ago, we could simply take the receiver off the cradle of the phone and make sure no one disturbed us. Today, with half the global population hooked on Facebook, Hangout, Messenger, Viber, WhatsApp, Zoom and myriad other instant messaging