The Covid-19 pandemic has thrown major challenges to public policy framing. While responses of the states to the pandemic differed significantly,

In February 2021, Covid-19 numbers started rising again in South Asia with the official daily case counts rising beyond 400,000 in India, 6,000 in Pakistan and 7,500 in Bangladesh, straining their health systems. The massive surge in India soon spilled over across the border into Nepal, leading to “apocalyptic” scenes of overwhelmed hospitals.

The legal protection for secrecy of “nationally important” information and its conflict with the free press constitute a dichotomy that has long been debated around the globe. Although governments are usually granted legal protection to keep certain documents and information undisclosed, guarantees of right to information and press freedom are considered essential to ensure government accountability.

Ravaged periodically by natural calamities, long dependent on foreign aid and remittances, and a perennial source of refugees and emigrants, Bangladesh was once “a basket case of misery,” as Zia Haider Rahman put it in his great debut novel, In the Light of What We Know.

Whether economic growth has an inherent mechanism to reduce both poverty and inequality has been extensively studied in developed and developing countries.

“We see all governments as obscure and invisible,” said Sir Francis Bacon, English philosopher and statesman, in 1605.

As Bangladesh looks forward to its next 50 years, there remain significant human development challenges for the country.

The Southwestern coastal region of Bangladesh has been marked as a critical disaster hotspot.

Bangladesh is under “strict lockdown” for the past many weeks but what is happening under its guise is anybody’s guess.

The subject matter of this write-up is the ranking of the world’s best universities. But I would like to start on a different note, quoting from legendary journalist Foyez Ahmad’s book “Moddhorater Ossharohi” (roughly translated as “Midnight Horseman”).

The increasing influence of China’s activity, particularly in the South China Sea and Indo-Pacific region, has raised many eyebrows among western nations and members of the Asia-Pacific region itself.

My friend Fouzul Kabir Khan’s recent book, “Win: How Public Entrepreneurship Can Transform the Developing World”, has brought back an issue critical to the development discourse in these pandemic times.

On this day 50 years ago (Sunday June 13, 1971), a report by Neville Anthony Mascarenhas, a Pakistani journalist, that appeared in the Sunday Times (London), shocked the world and made global-leaders take notice of the Pakistan Army’s genocide in Bangladesh.

My former classmate, now the finance minister, presented in the Parliament the budget for the year (also the golden anniversary of our independence), and I congratulate him for this honour.

With the February 2021 military coup, Myanmar once again hit global media headlines. While the military junta continues to clamp down on pro-democracy protestors and the country is wracked with conflict and unrest, how will the changing political situation affect the Rohingya community in Bangladesh and in Rakhine State in Myanmar?

Yesterday, leaders of the industrialised nations, known as G7, started their first day of discussions at the English seaside county Cornwall—the first meeting since the Covid-19 pandemic started, which has already claimed more than 3.75 million lives and the livelihoods of over a billion people.

Over the last couple of weeks, while the residents of Dhaka city, blistered by the scorching heat, were pining for rainfall, the subsequent heavy downpour inundating many parts of the city with knee-deep water

Much has been written about the flawed and controversial National Register of Citizens (NRC) in the northeastern Indian state of Assam and the mammoth humanitarian crisis that it has triggered.

Two orders given by India’s Supreme Court in two separate cases early this month have, once again, brought into sharp focus the issue of the colonial-era law relating to sedition in the context of media freedom. Both cases involve journalists and their reporting.

Covid-19 cases are on the rise in Bangladesh again. The average number of new cases over the last seven days was 1,854 per day, compared to an average of 1,444 a week earlier—that’s a 28 percent increase.