Information gap?
Photo: Iqbal Ahmed / driknews
After a long wait Upazila Parishad Election was held on 22 January 2009. Nevertheless, the election couldn't elicit much praise compared to the national election. This is also a great achievement that we got an important tier of local government after 17 years. Today I want to focus on the issue of Upazila Vice Chairman. I have been working on election observation and voter education for the last two years. From the part of my work, I looked after the Local Government (Upazila Parishad) Ordinance 2008. In the 2nd section of the Ordinance, it is clearly written that Upazila Parishad will be formed with 1 chairman and 2 Vice Chairmen (one of them must be a woman). It means that 1 seat is reserved for woman and the other is a general seat which is open for both women and men. This is really unfortunate that there was no woman candidate for the general vice chairman post. What was the explanation of non-participation of women candidates for the general vice chairman seat in Upazila Parishad election? Lack of information may be the reason since 1 post is reserved for women, naturally the other is for man. Before and after the election if we look at the news itemspublished by many newspapers we could see that some wrote, “Vice Chairman male candidates”. Why are we thinking this way? Are we not well informed or the government and the Election Commission could not disseminate the information properly? We, the general people, always depend on newspapers. We always try to equip ourselves with the information we get from newspapers. But this time we are a little bit disappointed. We hope that the news agencies of the country will be more responsible to present the right information and also our government will be more careful about the dissemination of information; otherwise we may lose many opportunities.
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