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Books on Bangladesh
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Update No: 013 - (25/01/07)
ELECTIONS POSTPONED
Bangladeshi President Iajuddin Ahmed has cancelled the 22 January polls and
the interim government has arrested at least 12,000 people, including senior
leaders of the two major alliances, in a nationwide crackdown on
"criminals" since the imposition of emergency.
A state of emergency has been declared and Ahmed said that it was not possible
to hold elections as per schedule. Security forces arrested a number of senior
leaders of both Awami League and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party in the
southeastern port city of Chittagong.
Over a dozen leaders of the student wings of Awami League and BNP have also been
arrested in the past two days. Paramilitary Bangladesh Rifles and the coast
guard have been put on high-alert to prevent criminals from fleeing the country.
According to experts, the cancellation of polls is valid only because of fears
that 19 people, mostly belonging to Khaleda Zia's BNP-led four-party alliance,
would be elected unopposed in the polls, boycotted by Sheikh Hasina's AL-led
combine. What is problematic now is that the next parliamentary elections may
get delayed up to a period of six months as the interim government will require
this time to prepare a correct voter list. The government is considering
introducing either national identity cards or voters' identity cards before
going for the polls and such tasks need minimum six months to complete. The
Bangladesh government will also form a committee to prepare guidelines to select
from either national identity cards or voter identity cards. The primary
objective of the interim government, however, seems to aim at the maintenance of
law and order, which of course is critical from the standpoint of democratic
rule. The anarchy and chaos surrounding these elections in the last several
months has compelled the President to take such action as deemed fit.
SEPARATION OF POWERS
In another major bid for democracy, Bangladesh's caretaker government of
Fakruddin Ahmed arrived at a landmark decision to separate the judiciary from
the executive that had been ordained by an apex court directive in 1999 but had
been overlooked by successive governments. The government published the gazette
notifications of four rules that will bring the magistrates, who work presently
under the executive branch of the government, directly under the authority of
the judiciary. The implementation of the new rules now requires only an
amendment to the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC) as per the 12-point
directives of the Supreme Court (SC) in 1999. According to Legal Secretary
Mohammad Alauddin Sardar, the documents were taken for publication in the
gazette after the president had signed it. "We are preparing to amend the
CrPC also as per the Supreme Court's directive," he said, adding that the
task of preparing a draft amendment had already started and that the next
parliament will have to adopt the amendments made in the notification.
Successive governments of the Awami League and Bangladesh Nationalist Party had
failed to implement the directive of the apex court in the past.
BANKING AND BUSINESS
CENTRAL BANK TO MONITOR INSTITUTIONAL & PRIVATE ACCOUNTS
The Bangladesh Bank (BB), the country's central bank, is going to introduce
a 'corporate memory' by keeping information relating to violation of its
prudential norms and regulations by banks, financial institutions and
individuals. The central bank is taking this measure to improve its monitoring
and supervisory capacity. The corporate memory will ensure the availability of
information with regard to the track record of institutions and individuals
against whom the BB has issued any directive or warning or taken corrective
actions for violating prudential norms and regulations. The BB has planned to
develop a central database by compiling all such individual databases of
different banks and non-banking financial institutions (NBFIs), maintained by
concerned department of the central bank.
FARM WORKERS TO MALAYSIA
In separate news, Malaysia is going to start importing Bangladeshi farm
workers from this week. The Bangladesh Workers Welfare Centre (BWWC), assigned
for this manpower export, claimed that prospects for local agricultural labour
forces being employed in the Malaysian plantation sector is hopeful, since
Indian and Indonesian farm workers have taken work in this sector in recent
times. Golam Ahad, the BWWC chairman, at a press conference at the Reporters
Unity auditorium, said that "this week we are sending a team of 40 persons
to Malaysia charging an amount of only 60,000 taka as service fee and by the
next week another team of 50 persons would leave Dhaka.We know that it is tough
for the average farmer's family to pay a huge sum of money, so we made
arrangements that the employers in Malaysia pay for the tickets of intending
migrants in which case, the primary charge to go to Malaysia would be reduced to
25-30 thousand taka." This organization seeks to ensure the welfare of
Bangladeshi expatriates in Malaysia. Ahad, a Bangladesh-born Malaysian citizen
who has been living there since 1977, was also critical of the Bangladeshi
recruitment agencies and their association, Baira (Bangladesh Association of
International Recruitment Agencies), saying that this trade body has long been
charging much higher rates than what is required to export manpower there. The
intention here is to export only the surplus of agricultural laborers to the
plantation sector in Malaysia so that they do not face any trouble to work
there.
A BOOM IN THE TELECOM SECTOR (Source: Reuters)
The number of mobile phone users in Bangladesh rose 135 percent in 2006 to
21.76 million and is likely to double again this year as competition in the
sector heats up. Five mobile phone providers in Bangladesh have added a record
12 million customers last year, with some 2.6 million new subscribers signed up
in December alone, said officials at the Bangladesh Telecom Regulatory
Commission. The number of mobile users in Bangladesh will grow to 50 million by
2009. Grameenphone, majority owned by Norway's Telenor, has doubled its
subscriber base to 10.76 million from 5.5 million in December 2005. But its
market share has declined to 50 percent from 60 percent in 2005. Aktel, majority
owned by Telekom Malaysia International, maintained its second place position,
with the number of subscribers rising to 6 million from 2.07 million. Egyptian
Orascom Telecom's Banglalink saw its client base grow by 2.61 million to 3.64
million customers. The only CDMA carrier CityCell, a joint venture between
Pacific Bangladesh Telecom Limited and Singapore Telecommunications, grew to
nearly 1 million users from 440,000 in 2005. Mehboob Chowdhury, Asia Pacific
chairman of the GSM Association, said he expected there would be 20 million new
subscribers by end of 2007, taking the total to more than 40 million. Nearly
half of Bangladeshis still live on less than a dollar a day. But the country has
been one of Asia's fastest growing cellular markets, with a mobile phone
penetration rate of around 12 percent. Mobile phone services have emerged as an
important contributor to the cash-strapped nation's economy. The mobile sector
added $650 million (330 million pounds) to Bangladesh's gross domestic product
in 2005, telecom officials said. The country has only 1 million fixed-line
phones, mostly provided by state-own Bangladesh Telephone and Telegraph Board.
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