Mohammed Nasim, a veteran Awami League leader and a frontline figure in almost all democratic movements in the country, died at a city hospital yesterday.

With numbers of reported new cases and deaths growing almost every day, Bangladesh has overtaken China in terms of confirmed coronavirus cases.

State Minister for Religious Affairs Sheikh Md Abdullah passed away last night at the Dhaka Central Military Hospital. He was 75.

An increasing number of experienced doctors at the frontline in the fight against Covid-19 are falling victim to the virus, creating vacuum in the healthcare system that is already strained by the pandemic.

The Covid-19 situation is gradually going from bad to worse with the death toll and number of new patients rising every day.

Telecom companies and other stakeholders of the industry yesterday slammed the spike in supplementary duty on mobile data usage, calls and any service that requires a SIM card.

When many students are on the verge of dropping out due to the discontinuation of their academic activities during the coronavirus pandemic, the traditional allocation for education in the proposed budget with no specific plan to recover the learning loss has frustrated the country’s educationists.

The government’s designs to fund a large chunk of next fiscal year’s budget by borrowing heavily from the banking sector will leave the pandemic-stricken economy in a tight spot, said the Centre for Policy Dialogue yesterday.

The government has forgotten about the ongoing pandemic and subsequently failed to be innovative enough to frame fiscal measures to take the economy on to the path of recovery, said the Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD) yesterday.

Finance Minister AHM Mustafa Kamal yesterday remained defiant that he would be able to save both lives and livelihoods and steer the economy on to the path to recovery along the way by way of the budget he has prepared for fiscal 2020-21.

The much-anticipated national budget for fiscal year 2020-21 turns out to be a document trying to run on the momentum.

Allocation of total government expenditure by sector FY 2020-21

There is hardly any precedence of preparing a national budget under such extraordinary hard times and with so much uncertainties and dilemmas.

There is no specific programme mentioned in the budget for the urban poor who have been hit the hardest during the shutdown of the economy for over two months.

Hands out for help

Any finance minister delivering a national budget wants, ideally, to project three qualities: calm, authority and very slight dullness.

The previous global financial recessions gave a lesson that any economic fallout can be tackled smoothly if the health of banks is protected from the crisis.

In the wake of a demand crunch for electricity and gas due to the pandemic, the government has cut the spending on power and energy for fiscal 2020-21 as it has allocated Tk 26,758 crore for these sectors -- 4.6 percent down year on year.

The proposed budget has brought no cheers for stock investors, who have been battered by a prolonged slump in indices, but promised measures to develop the country’s bond market.

The stimulus packages and measures announced by the government are inadequate to revive exports from the fallouts of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, according to industry leaders.