Zyma Islam

On October 27, the Jatiya Sangsad passed the Narcotics Control Bill 2018 to replace the 30-year-old law from 1990. The new law has introduced the death sentence for people found to be in possession of over 200 grams of yaba, or 25 grams of heroin.

Many are quick to state that the number of women in the parliament is actually higher because 50 reserved seats are kept for women for the sake of representation. However, experts argue that the 'reserved seats' are merely a token representation. Why is it that more women don't contest elections, and why aren't reserved seats equal to actual representation?

An elderly man has been rotting in prison for nine years even after getting presidential general amnesty.

The #metoo and #metooindia hashtags are felling old oaks in Indian media including the likes of veteran actors such as Nana Patekar and Alok Nath, singer Kailash Kher, filmmaker Sajid Khan, author Chetan Bhagat and even deputy foreign minister and former founder editor of The Telegraph MJ Akbar.

The minimum wage of garments workers has been declared at Tk 8,000 per month—and it seems, at this point, it is a signed and sealed deal. City life is going as is.

It all started years ago, when an advertisement by the National Housing Authority appeared in The Daily Inqilab on February 14, 1995, inviting prospective buyers for land in Mirpur.

“Being a woman was a credit not a criterion,” is how Dr Susane Giti described becoming the first woman to achieve the rank of major general of the Bangladesh Army.

Almost every time any government agency tried to ensure accountability and transparency of the duty-free liquor trade, it found itself in a legal limbo. Over the last two decades, diplomatic bonded warehouses, who import duty-free liquor for diplomats and foreigners, filed writ after writ with the High Court challenging the legality of the government action.

Officially, most bars and social clubs neither import nor purchase alcohol yet they log huge sales; restrictive law, high import tariff, bureaucratic nightmare encouraging smuggling; govt loses big, earning almost nothing out of this trade.

The contract made between tea workers and tea garden owners expired last year. They spent the last two years fighting for their minimum wage to be increased from Tk 85 per day to Tk 230. This would have brought their monthly cash wages from Tk 2,550 to TK 6,900, which is approximately equivalent to the minimum wages of the ready-made garments sector.

“[...] Think of the birangona not as the haunted spectre that would feed the imaginary of the nation but as one who has to make her life in the world in a mode of ordinary realism.” Veena Das, in her foreword to Nayanika Mookherjee's The Spectral Wound

Lunchtime was just over at Balukhali camp 8E. The household of Akhter Hujur officially has four members -- himself, his young wife, her sister and a tiny infant daughter -- but there is always one extra mouth to feed. That mouth belongs to a person with neither mother or father, nor family.

On public fronts, ministers delivered implicit and tactful statements to the public asking them to wrap up their banners and slogans and go home. Out of the public eye, hundreds of individuals were detained in police stations across the country or attacked by individuals allegedly from the ruling-party's student wing, while teachers were threatened to withdraw support from their students.

On the morning of July 26, 2018 the “bihari” camps in Mirpur sectors 10 and 11 were gripped by panic as they waited with bated breath for a bulldozer to drive up their alleyways and tear down their homes.

“Where is your warrant?” is the first question that people ask when the police knocks on the door. That is the question being asked by a daughter in a video that recently went viral on Facebook, when the police came to apprehend her father. The police did not heed her plea and pushed right past in.

The computer is still a rare sight in many villages, but people huddling around a small television screen at the local tea stall, is as common as can be. Well, not in these villages, and the impacts are complex and far-reaching.

The expansion of Dhaka city is showing no signs of slowing down. Private developers are pushing the boundaries of the metropolis by building eastwards and what currently exists as rural townships show the promise of being the future Dhaka city. Will we build it right this time, or will an unplanned urbanisation once again be the go-to-method? Martin Rama, chief economist for the South Asia region of the World Bank, talks to Zyma Islam of The Daily Star about the planned development of greater Dhaka.

Deportation of undocumented Bangladeshis from the USA is nothing new. In the last 10 years, the country issued deportation orders for 7,364 Bangladeshis. The period during Bill Clinton's presidency particularly saw over a thousand Bangladeshis being marked for deportation each year.

Even mid-way last year, the Department of Environment's environmental clearance committee questioned whether Navana's Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) bottling plant in Mongla should be cleared. “The plant is within the designated Ecologically Critical Area around the Sundarbans,” they opined. They held off on giving the license.

Last year Dolly Rani was working as a helper at a ready-made garments factory in Jiranibazaar of Savar when the advent of a machine made her useless. “I used to cut thread,” says Rani. She worked in the finishing section, and was one of the women who stood at the assembly line snipping away the loose ends of threads from finished products for hours on