Open letter to Chief Adviser
It was a great pleasure to be present at the NRB conference in Dhaka in December 2007, and listen to your usual thoughtful speech! Sir, I am writing to you in response to your suggestion to the NRBs, to send you emails with our personal views and suggestions.
We closely follow your sincere steps to create the environment for fair elections, for electing honest and devoted leaders to run the country to brighter days. I live and work in Stockholm, Sweden. From my 33 years of experience of living in the East and West Europe, and South East Asia, I believe, today the fight against poverty will be won or lost in rural areas, home to about 70% of the world's poor. The likelihood of achieving the Millennium Development Goals without a strong focus on improving the livelihoods and service accessibility of rural dwellers is low. I travel to Bangladesh 3-4 times a year, and during each visit to Bangladesh, I always work with rural development projects in the villages in the district of Magura. We are teaching at university, college and schools in Bangladesh and working with ICT for rural development project, funded by Swedish organisations like SIDA and SPIDER.
The improvements in the well-being of the poor will only be possible through enhancement of their intellectual, productive, social and environmental assets. We need to focus on research and development to improve the well-being of rural people by building their human capacity, and developing knowledge, and productive, social, and environmental assets. This will increase their income and profit streams and ability to escape poverty. Therefore, in the rural areas, we need honest and devoted people with vision and dynamism to guide such development work!
Our rural educational institutions must offer education that can critically analyse the information, and effectively prepare students for an exciting, stimulating and challenging entrepreneurial career. We will have to work to develop knowledge for rural development, for a better quality of life and a sustainable and healthy environment for present and future generations in the rural areas. Our research activities need to cover the food science and human health, production in agriculture, rural economics and development, marketing and ecology and the environment, both in Bangladesh and internationally. Our health care centres will have to develop appropriate and affordable health care systems for rural people. We need to set up rural universities to:
a) Bring university resources together to solve rural development problems.
b) Provide a broad range of educational programmes to develop skill for environmental management, agricultural and natural resource management, with human and physical capital.
c) Coordinate and support research that improves our understanding of rural economic and community development issues, problems and opportunities.
In conclusion, we must start to apply ICT for rural development for better education, improved health and agricultural output, business promotion and job creation in the rural areas. And for that, we need to have qualified, honest and devoted leaders at the union level. True leaders at the union level, can also prepare a foundation to elect honest and competent leaders at the national level.
Sir, let us first start the process of creating true leaders at the union level. The true rural leaders will be able to set true norms and values for the rural people to elect the appropriate lawmakers.
To elect such leaders at the rural level, the government may set necessary criteria, in terms of education, experience, skill, honesty etc. The elected leaders should be continuously trained by the professional institutions to be capable of facing the opportunities and challenges of our rural areas, and learn to manage the local administration and guide the development projects with honestly and efficiency.
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel.
Comments