Naznin Tithi

Dr Safiqul Islam, Director, BRAC Education Programme, shares his thoughts with The Daily Star’s Naznin Tithi about the challenges associated with school reopening, ways to recover children’s learning loss over the extended break from school, and BRAC’s education model for this crisis situation. This interview is part of an interview series by The Daily Star that aims to give readers an idea of what changes to expect in a post-Covid-19 world.

Prof. Muzaherul Huq, former adviser, South-East Asia region, World Health Organization (WHO), and founder, Public Health Foundation of Bangladesh, talks to Naznin Tithi of The Daily Star about the way forward in our fight to contain the spread of Covid-19.

The government has decided to keep all educational institutions closed until June 15. Earlier, the PM said that schools might remain closed till September, if the situation did not improve. If schools remain closed for a long period, how will it impact our primary education sector?

For Nasima Begum, a 40-year-old who works as a domestic help in the capital’s Mirpur area, balancing between her paid and unpaid works has become a daily battle ever since she came to Dhaka in search of a livelihood.

It was March, 1948. A 13-year-old girl in a remote village in Cox’s Bazar would often hear her seniors at school talk about the extent of discrimination the people of East Pakistan faced everywhere.

Every morning, as I step out of my home to go to work, I am faced with the same nuisances: the dilapidated road in front of my house which has been like this for as long as I can remember, the piled up garbage here and there, the open manholes spreading obnoxious smells, and the nonchalant vendors selling vegetables (and even fish) taking up half the space of the road.

It is most unfortunate that the situation of the Buriganga could not be improved much even after taking so many steps and projects.

The new transport law has been watered down quite a bit because of opposition from the transport owners and workers. Even so, the workers called a strike recently demanding amendments to the law. How would you evaluate the new law and the workers’ demands...

As I pass the planning commission office in Agargaon on a rickshaw, on a jam-packed road in the evening, I cannot help noticing the big advertisements

On October 24, Abiron Begum’s family members received her dead body in a coffin from the Shahjalal International Airport.

In the aftermath of Abrar Fahad’s murder in a BCL “torture cell” at the Sher-e-Bangla Hall of Buet, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina directed all the educational institutions to look into their student dormitories to find out if there are similar torture cells there as well.

After last year’s countrywide road safety movement, we hoped that there would be some significant changes in our transport sector because of the big promises made by the government. But unfortunately, the government could not keep its promises, and so no substantive changes have been made.

We have been witnessing increasing incidents of river erosion this year, which has already devoured vast areas of croplands and homesteads of people across the country. Do you think river erosion has been causing more damage this year compared to previous years?

A sustainable solution to the crisis is contingent upon the voluntary repatriation of the Rohingya people to their homeland in Rakhine state in Myanmar, with their safety, security and dignity ensured. After two failed attempts to set the repatriation process on its due

Many of us are probably not aware of the condition known in medical science as cerebral palsy, which affects a child’s muscle tone, movement, and motor skills.

Right after the country’s independence, when the literacy rate in the country was 16.8 percent (according to UNICEF), a group of young people in Kochubari-Krishtopur, a village of Thakurgaon, started a movement to make all the villagers literate.

With more than three and a half lakh people already having been infected with dengue fever, as per a report by the daily Prothom Alo on July 23, the dengue situation in the country has gone totally out of control. However, data from the Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS) shows that a total of 7,766 people have been infected till July 23 this year. This is because the DGHS only keeps track of data of some particular hospitals and clinics, and those who were infected but did not go to a hospital were excluded from government estimates.

I assume there is hardly anyone amongst us who has never felt cheated after buying a product or taking a service in exchange for money.

It seems that the present crisis in the state-owned jute mills will hardly be over with the Tk 169.14 crore allocated by the government to the Bangladesh Jute Mills Corporation (BJMC) to pay the workers their dues.

Just as a country’s development cannot be sustainable without a properly functioning democracy, development without environmental protection is also bound to fail. While Bangladesh is advancing with its various development projects at a fast pace...