Things

The flight time between Kolkata and Dhaka is 35 minutes. One January my wife and I visited India - Goa, Cochin, rice boat on the Kerala backwaters and things like that - and had to return to Dhaka via Kolkata. The trip was planned carefully and we anticipated a 2 hour wait at Kolkata before returning home on a Biman flight. 24 hours later we managed to get a plane and arrive back in Dhaka. I notice today that all 5 Biman planes dedicated to international flights have broken down and delays are expected. Clearly nothing has changed since 2006, even after the purging of the inflated number of employees.

One thing all political parties in Bangladesh could point to as a success was the apparent removal of the spectre of famine in the country. Yesterday I read that the World Food Organisation has placed Bangladesh on its list of 31 food deficit nations. One wonders what has gone wrong. Maybe its to do with land management, the increasing spread of arsenic contaminated paddi, the shift from the mofussil areas to the cities by destitute peasants seeking a livelihood and the ever-increasing population. Of all the problems confronting Bangladesh this is possibly the most serious given the volatility of the country and the fact that the fundamentalists have a strategy of 'colonizing' rural areas where the food is produced.