On September 15, we saw hundreds of garment workers taking to the streets again at the Mirpur 1 intersection, demanding their unpaid wages. This kind of protest has become a common feature on the Dhaka streets, as factories are shutting down without paying

In 2014, United Nations tweeted, “Peace means dignity, well-being for all, not just absence of war”. The statement couldn’t have been closer to the truth: peace is not just the absence of war, it is the building of inclusive societies, where people can live with dignity and coexist in harmony with each other.

Bangladesh’s LDC graduation, to take effect from 2024, needs to be celebrated as a recognition of the country’s remarkable progress on many fronts over the past years. At the same time, there is no denying the fact that graduation will entail a number of new

One major challenge faced by policymakers in most developing countries is that though conventional measurements of poverty are useful in identifying the poor people in general, these measurements fail to capture the critical sections of the population who are

I have seen that every time a new PSC is drawn, transparency, national interest, and the long-term results or consequences of a PSC are not considered. In most cases, it is seen that the PSC is drawn based on the model proposed by companies that will be its beneficiaries.

If you want to understand the present, look to the past. All the talk right now in apparel supply chains is of new technology, automation and robots potentially replacing humans. We read constantly about how customisation is the future—that consumers want to go online and bespoke their clothing to their own specific requirements. “Personalisation” is the name of the game. Surely it is far better to have personalised products than mass customisation, right? Perhaps so, provided that you are prepared to pay for it, but who is? How many people do we see wearing personalised apparel products?

The World Economic Forum recently published its Travel and Tourism Competitiveness Report 2019, which provides an insight into global trends and the state of the travel and tourism industry across the world.

I still remember the day when the picture of three-year-old Syrian boy Aylan Kurdi lying dead on the beach surfaced on the Internet.

Does the outpouring of anger and grief after some of the high-profile rape crimes in recent months signal a social awakening?

The final National Register of Citizens (NRC), which left out around 19.6 lakh people in Assam, puts India’s and the state’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in a quandary.

As opposed to what some of the seniors in the field would say, this year, both the Eid seasons actually brought about telefilms and stories, even though few in number, reflecting positive changes where storytelling and acting were concerned.

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it really fall? If another tree follows it, and then another, followed by a million others, and no one is around to hear the sound of their fall, do they really fall?

Violence against women and girls is a major global issue. It is no more confined to a specific culture, region or country, or to particular groups of women within a society; it is prevalent in every corner of the globe that impacts women and girls,

Asean has a lot of work to do for the sake of its own relevancy as Myanmar and Bangladesh make another attempt to repatriate thousands of Muslim Rohingyas to strife-torn Rakhine state.

Twenty-eight years is a long time to wait. It takes a lot of sitting, sweating and soul-searching to do to get through it, a lot of courage to start again once it’s over, and a lot of catching up to do as a new phase begins under a different sky and far different circumstances.

More often than not, climate change is analysed from a long-term perspective. Surely, the word “change” itself requires one to look at it through a futuristic lens.

The World Bank claims poverty is decreasing around the world but UN research shows it depends on what you measure. If we are serious about reducing poverty, we need to start by properly identifying it.

Since some recent terrorist incidents, concerns about the impact of social media have been reverberating throughout the world. Legislators and policy makers are under pressure to “do something,” even without fully understanding the problems and the viable solutions.

A common cry we hear in global textile supply chains is that near-shoring is a more sustainable and perhaps ethical option for apparel brands. In the past couple of years, we have seen evidence—albeit limited—of this, with the US President Donald Trump talking about bringing manufacturing home, and efforts by the UK to redevelop its once-burgeoning textile industry.

After the Indian Supreme Court recently rejected the Indian central and Assamese governments’ plea for sample re-verification of names included in the National Register of Citizens (NRC), politics has begun playing out afresh over the issue. On August 1, the Bharatiya Janata Party government in Assam released, in the legislative assembly, data related to inclusion and exclusion of names in 33 districts of Assam in the draft final NRC, which was released in July, 2018, and called into question the fairness of the exercise of updating the NRC.