Editorial
Crisis or no crisis, stay clear of IMF
TRUE to speculations by different quarters, the Bangladeshi economy appears more or less insulated from the raging global financial crisis. At least, as of yet, domestic trends do not reflect a strong impact on the economy due to the financial fallout elsewhere in the world. While experts and economists have speculated about the likely impact on Bangladesh, these speculations have been isolated and based on whatever information was available to them. From that perspective, a government taskforce to assess the likely impacts and probable strategies to overcome the global crisis is a good idea. Although the suggestion of such an assessment exercise, comprising different stakeholders and sponsored by the government, has been in circulation for quite some time, the taskforce is yet to be set in motion. It may very well be that Bangladesh would face some adverse impacts in terms of exports earnings or lower remittance as consumption and demand for services decrease across the world. This assessment exercise, however, either through a taskforce or through commissioned studies, must not be conducted merely to justify further financial assistance from the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank.
As a report published in New Age on Friday, indicates, the assessment of likely risks might well turn out to be the prelude to another financial arrangement with the IMF since the last one under the Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility has expired. The possibility, as it was mentioned during a press conference after a meeting between the government and a visiting IMF delegation, would certainly be heartening for the multilateral lending agency that appears to thrive during financial crises such as the present one. It was during the Asian crisis of the 1990s when a number of countries had to turn to this lending agency for funds as they were facing liquidity crunch and were bound to follow the disastrous prescriptions issued by the agency.
Not only were those prescriptions almost opposite to what developed countries are doing to counter the crisis, but countries that pointedly refused to fall in line and followed their own strategies weathered the crisis much better than those who conformed to the prescribed measures. It is not a surprise then that the IMF has lost a number of large clients in the past several years. A number of its large clients, including Brazil, and Argentina, have paid back their debts earlier than scheduled and refused to renew their arrangement.
The lending agency previously made a bid to initiate a new programme with Bangladesh under its newly introduced Policy Support Instrument. Now that Bangladesh does not have any arrangements with the IMF, there could be further pressure for accepting its funds through a new facility, which would presumably stipulate an agreement to the policy support instrument programme. It would only mean that Bangladesh’s sovereignty over its development policies will be undermined. The government should, instead, look for other means to weather through any potential crisis that lies ahead and initiate concrete steps to dissociate itself from the clutches of multilateral lending agencies.
No sign of power sector
being govt’s priority
THE prognosis is scary. According to a report front-paged in New Age on Saturday, officials of the Power Development Board fear a power shortage in the range of 1,500 megawatts and 2,000 megawatts every day during the peak of the coming summer. Scarily still, it is the best case scenario, presupposing that the power board will be able to maintain generation of 3,700-4,000MW of electricity every day. Currently, the board generates about 3,200MW against a daily demand for 4,150MW and expects total generation to go up to 3,700-3,800MW in March when the 360MW Haripur independent power plant gets back on line. The Haripur plant tripped earlier and went offline; the same could happen to any of the existing plants anytime.
The projected power shortfall would translate into, as the report indicates, power outages for at least 10-12 hours in most areas outside the capital Dhaka and 4-6 hours in most city areas every day. A direct consequence of the power outages will be severe disruption in water supply in urban areas and in irrigation in rural areas. The impending power shortfall, in a nutshell, looks set to create a ripple that would affect every aspect of the people’s lives, both at the micro and macro levels. The threat of disruption that it poses to agricultural and industrial production will ultimately tell on the economy, while the daily irritant that it will entail, in the form of water supply shortage at the peak of summer, will stretch the people’s patience to a point where localised agitations, as we have seen in the past, could become inevitable.
There have already been indications of what is to come in future; in some city areas power outages have ‘started taking place earlier than usual this year’. However, in the past five weeks or so since its assumption of office, the government has hardly given the impression to the people that it has initiated any move to cope with the impending crisis. In its election manifesto, the Awami League identified power and energy as one of its five priority issues, promising, among other things, that power production will be increased to 5,000MW in the next three years or by 2011 and to 7,000MW by 2013. The people do not expect the government to improve power generation and supply overnight. What they expect from the government is an indication that identification of power and energy as a priority issue has not merely been part of pre-elections rhetoric. It will not be exaggerating in any way to suggest that there has not been any such indication from the government thus far. Hence, the government would be well-advised to come out with a detailed strategy to cope with the impending power crisis in the short term and to bring about an overall improvement in power generation and supply in the long term.
Time to draw the line
The time has come to make the students realise that vandalism is a crime, even if it stems from genuine grievances, and that the law applies for them as it does for any other group in society,
writes Mir Ashfaquzzaman
ON FEBRUARY 12, several hundred students of Ahsanullah University of Science and Technology confined all their teachers, staged demonstrations and brought out processions on the university campus at Tejgaon in the capital Dhaka. They also vandalised the furniture in the teachers’ lounge and blocked the road in front of the university, disrupting traffic for nearly three hours. They were protesting against the university administration’s February 3 decision to expel two civil engineering students for three terms over a scuffle between civil and electrical engineering students on November 27. The scuffle took place after two female students of the civil engineering department were denied entry to a cultural function organised by the electrical engineering department. The protesters demanded that the expulsion order should be revoked as it had been based on a ‘biased enquiry’ into the November 27 incident. The unrest began at around 11:00am and continued well into the evening.
Two days earlier, students of polytechnic institutes in Rajshahi, Patuakhali, Comilla, Rangpur, Rangpur, Sherpur, Satkhira and Gopalganj went on the rampage, ransacking administrative offices, blocking highways, vandalising vehicles and clashing with the police. They were protesting against the latest change in the ‘referred examinations system’. The protesters demanded withdrawal of the latest circular of the Bangladesh Technical Education Board, which said: ‘Any students who fail three times in the final examinations in any semester will be considered non-collegiate examinees.’ During clashes with the students, the police fired rubber bullets and lobbed teargas shells. Overall, 200 people, including students and policemen, were wounded in the clashes. Traffic on different highways remained suspended for three hours or more.
On January 27, Jagannath University in the capital Dhaka was closed for an indefinite period after students clashed with the police. The students were demonstrating against governmental inaction with regard to forcible occupation of 12 dormitories of the university by influential people of the locality. The trouble began when a group of students tried to march towards Bangabhaban; the planned to lay siege to the official residence of the president to press home their demand. The law enforcers intercepted the marching students and charged batons on them. The next two hours, the entire university campus and adjoining areas virtually turned into a battlefield. The police lobbed more than a hundred teargas shells and fired rubber bullets, while the students retaliated with brickbats. More than one hundred people were injured. Several vehicles were vandalised.
On January 10, several hundred students of the Government Titumir College went on the rampage at Mohakhali and surrounding areas in the capital city. The marauding students vandalised more than 100 vehicles on the Airport Road. Traffic was suspended for nearly two hours. The trouble started from a rumour that a female student of the college had been run over by a car. As it turned out later on, the student in question actually sustained cuts and bruises after being knocked down by a car when she was crossing the road. No one knew for sure whose fault it was—the car driver’s or the student’s.
Of course, like any other groups in society, students also reserve the right to express dissent or displeasure, and demand redress to their grievances. They have the right to stage demonstration, bring out procession, form human chain… the ultimate objective should be to make their voice heard and to have their demands met, their grievances addressed. It seems, however, that they are becoming the causes of other people’s grievances while trying to express their own, as vandalism becomes their most preferred means to express dissent or displeasure. Sometimes they go on the rampage, ransacking administrative offices of their respective educational institutions, putting up barricades on roads and highways, vandalising vehicles, setting public transport on fire, clashing with law enforcers, etc on the flimsiest of reasons or at the faintest of provocations. Sometimes they don’t need any reasons or provocations to go on a spree of vandalism, either.
There seems to be an alarming tendency among students to get violent just to make their presence felt, their voices heard. Whether such a tendency stems from sustained low-intensity unrest within the student community, which, in turn, may have been the result of a deep-seated sense of uncertainty is for the socio-psychoanalysts to tell. The ground reality at this point seems to be that students are themselves becoming more the sinners than the sinned against. They seem to have developed a sense of entitlement of sort that they can inflict pain on others or damage other’s property whenever they want, just to let the world know that someone or something has crossed them.
Needless to say, their grievances are not always genuine, nor are their reactions rational. It is not to suggest, however, that they would have been right to go on the rampage had their grievances been genuine. Let us take the case of the polytechnic students. Neither is it acceptable nor is it fair to students of other disciplines that the polytechnic students should be allowed to take referred examinations as many times as it takes them to complete a course successfully. The technical education board circular does not bar them from taking the exams, either; all it says is that if a student fails three times in the final examinations in any semester he or she will be considered a non-collegiate examinee.
Equally deplorable were the actions of the Titumir College students. First of all, it was just a rumour that one of their fellows had died in a road accident. Then again, even if she had been run over by a car, would it have warranted the orgy of destruction that the students engaged in? Certainly not. The least said about the Ahsanullah University students the better. One could sympathise with the Jagannath University students for sure; after all, at a time when the university halls of residence are bursting at their seams, it is unacceptable that as many as 12 dormitories remain forcibly occupied by influential outsiders. Moreover, the police may have overreacted in trying to stop the protesters from marching towards Bangabhaban. Still, one may wonder whether the cause and context were grave enough to trigger such a prolonged period of violence, which, ironically, brought more misery to the student community in the end, in the form of an indefinite closure of the university.
Students, as the cliché goes, are the future of the nation. Some of them will go on to take over the helms of the state. It is, therefore, imperative that they should learn to discern right from the wrong, just from the unjust. The incidents described above could be an indicator that at least a sizeable section of the student community may have developed a distorted sense of entitlement. As if, when it comes to their cause, anything goes, regardless of the merit of such a cause. As if, rule of law does not apply in their case. Beneath the veneer of vandalism, there seems to be a deep-seated disregard for law and order. As if, the meaning of ‘the law should take its own course’ to them is ‘the law should took their course’.
Such disdainful disregard for law and order may very well have stemmed from a collective loss of faith in the justice delivery system; after all, hardly has there been any redress to their genuine grievances. Or, it may well be that it is inspired and emboldened by society’s indulgence in their proclivity for lawlessness in the name of agitation for their ‘lawful’ demands. Either way, it is alarming that a significant section of the student community is growing up with no respect whatsoever for law and order. The time may have come to draw the line.
The first step in this direction should come from the law enforcement authorities. They need to instil in the students the inviolable truth that no one is above and beyond the law, and there cannot be any exception just because they are students. The authorities need to establish certain rules of thumb, one of these being no matter how genuine one’s grievances are, they do not justify infliction of pain on others and destruction of the property of others. Rowdy students need to be made accountable for their destructive acts. Thus far, the authorities have only prosecuted students when it served their partisan purposes. Such selective applications of law need to end and vandalism needs to be dealt with an iron hand, within the ambit of the law. Legal actions need to be supplemented by disciplinary actions of the educational institutions that the rowdy students belong to.
Disciplinary or legal actions alone will not do, however. Teachers have an important role to play here. They need to make the students aware of the fact that they are part of the educated section of society, and that they privilege they are afforded demands responsible behaviour from them. The students need to be made to realise that they set a bad precedent for the people at large when they engage in such mindless acts of destruction.
Students are indeed the future. How the future would look depends on how society shapes them up today. The string of mindless destruction that students of different educational institutions have engaged in over the past few days and weeks tend to indicate that society is doing a poor job at that.
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