Rebuilding Bangladesh

Bangladesh's courts, police and bureaucracy are so weak that the country has come last in Transparency International's world corruption index five years in a row. The government's most popular initiative has been formation of Rab, a police force that draws support in part for its willingness to kill. "It's been a crazy few years since I've been here," says Larry Maramis, the UN Development Programme's deputy resident representative.

Bangladesh, dubbed in the 1970s by Henry Kissinger as a "bottomless basket", is making surprising progress on other fronts, too. According to the UNDP, the country now scores higher than neighbour India on several key barometers of social development, such as infant mortality, child vaccination, and employment of womena striking turnaround over the past decade or so. The country's much-praised micro credit scheme, operated by the Grameen Bank, has lent an average of $120 each to 5.8 million people. And the government claims that 100% of young children are now enrolled in primary school, and that girls at last have equal access to educationgoals that the PM, as a woman leading a Muslim majority nation, had made a priority. "If we want to progress as a country, to remove poverty and spread awareness on family planning, we have to give [girls] equal rights," she explains. The economy is looking up, too. GDP has grown by at least 5% for three years running, and the Asian Development Bank predicts that growth will hit 6.5% in 2006. Foreign Direct Investment rose from $138 million to $454 million in the first six months of last year compared to the same period the previous year. The number of cell-phone users rose by 144% in a year. And Goldman Sachs has rated Bangladesh as one of 11 developing nations that, in the long term, could emulate the success of China, India, Brazil and Russia.

Alan Rosling, a prime mover behind Tata's investment in Bangladesh, said, "There is poverty, but there's also a fast-developing middle class, who makes it an attractive market."

Bangladesh may never truly leave behind this legacy of bloodshed, corruption and mistrust. But in what was once one of the saddest places on earth, there is new hope.

Bangladesh has achieved progress that few outsiders, or even Bangladeshis, believed possible a few years ago. "All we need," says University of Dhaka

Professor of Economics Abul Barakat, "is five years of good governance, and we'd be away." Surely no nation ever deserved it more.

Why is Bangladeshi politics so intense? It seems that parties are either in power or trying to overthrow the government.

When both parties expend all their energy fighting each other, there's a danger that governance can take second place. Is that what is happening in Bangladesh?