Reaz Ahmad

On the first day of April in 1930, a law came into force in the then Indian subcontinent restraining child marriage.

Keeping intact a provision that allows marriage of underage girls and boys in “special circumstances”, the Jatiya Sangsad last night passed the Child Marriage Restraint Bill 2017 with 18 and 21 as minimum marriageable age for women and men respectively.

Last time the world witnessed a phenomenal growth in agricultural productivity was back in the 60s.

It has been seven long years since water resources ministers of Bangladesh and India last met to talk about Teesta at the platform of Joint Rivers Commission (JRC). Since then Bangladesh has been more than ready about holding a meeting of the JRC, an official instrument devised jointly by Bangladesh and India back in 1972, to resolve water disputes and harness common water resources for mutual and regional benefits.

Regulators are having a hard time curbing the worrisome rise in air pollution in the country largely because of a “culture of non-compliance” with laws.

As the Child Marriage Restraint Act is about to be passed in parliament, the government and rights bodies continue to be at loggerheads over a provision that permits wedlock prior to one reaching the minimum marriageable age.

It takes seven months to produce 2,000kgs of pabda (Ompok) from a fish farm the size of a football pitch. How about getting the same results in half the time from an indoor space that is hardly the size of a penalty box?

The National Seed Board has approved a range of rice, wheat, potato and kenaf varieties with promises of higher productivity, and better resistance to disease and stress.

Nearly three years into the elimination of a highly contagious bird flu virus in the country, a recent outbreak of the particular strain of avian influenza resulted in deaths of 3,000 birds at a poultry farm in the capital's outskirt Dhamrai.

A year after its first outbreak, wheat blast has reemerged and this time quite early in the season, causing fears of production loss of the country's second most important cereal after rice.

With a fifth of the country's yearly jute exports at stake following India's imposition of anti-dumping duty on import of jute products from Bangladesh and Nepal, a national jute advisory committee meeting yesterday decided to engage immediately with India for lifting the duty.

Vegetable production has more than doubled in just over a decade, making Bangladesh one of the fastest-growing vegetable producers in the world. The growth in recent years stems from better seeds and technologies as opposed to the growths in the 80s and early 90s when more agro land was dedicated to vegetable farming.

Three years after the release of Bt Brinjal, Bangladesh is going to get its second genetically modified (GM) crop -- a disease resistant potato -- as scientists have sought government approval for its commercial use.

Girls being married off before reaching adulthood, too many teenage pregnancies and subsequent births of babies with low

It has been nearly two months since Bob Dylan was declared winner of this year's Nobel in literature, making him the only singer-songwriter to win the award.

Thanks to a favourable monsoon and buoyant prices that Aman growers across the country get a reason to rejoice after a rather unhappy ending of Boro season. With over 80 percent paddy already harvested, the Department of Agriculture Extension (DAE) and the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation have projected a bumper Aman output -- 13.6 million tonnes -- marginally surpassing last year's record high of 13.5 million tonnes.

In a world where as many as 700 million women were married off before they could reach adulthood, we'll only contribute to that statistic by keeping such loopholes in a law which is supposed to protect the childhood of our girls.

Child marriage in Bangladesh has come down to around 43 per cent from 62.3 per cent in the last two decades, finds a new research by the Washington-based think tank International Food Policy Research Institute.

Economic growth and poverty reduction alone cannot solve the problem of undernutrition. Had that been the case,

This season, the government is withholding wheat cultivation in eight south and southwestern districts to prevent the