The Illusion of Progress

In 2021, when Bangladesh qualified to graduate from a Least Developed Country into a Developing Nation after officially meeting UN eligibility thresholds, all newspapers carried the news with a flourish of data and statistics. Ordinary citizens like us, who dread economic jargons, naively believed in our economic prosperity and felt immensely elated. When the Padma Bridge was inaugurated amid much fanfare and celebration, which was shown on mega screens across the country, we rejoiced at it. Again, when metro rail was opened to the public, it was hailed as a pacesetter of a new era of progress. Similarly, when the Karnaphuli underground tunnel came into operation, the nation took it as a giant leap towards modernity. Nowadays you cannot help marvelling at massive flyovers, dazzling shopping malls and towering skyscrapers that have sprung up here and there in the big cities. To many of us, this visible material success appeared to be a yardstick of our progress.

But the myth spun for years about Bangladesh becoming an emerging economy was exploded recently when we saw hundreds of depositors, tears in their eyes, holding banners in front of some banks demanding return of their hard-earned deposits. With a rude shock, we came to realise in our bones that those banks we entrusted our money with were merely swindlers. It turned out that millions of dollars from the public fund have been embezzled and smuggled out of the country and that too under the very noses of the overseeing authorities.

Fragile economy is the mirror of a society that is inwardly feeble and empty but strives to maintain a façade. As soon as a foreigner enters the country, they become impressed to see the beautification of the landscape on both sides of the airport road with murals, sculptures, colourful lighting and planting of decorative trees. A glimpse of beauty is no doubt edifying. But all good feelings vanish into thin air as soon as the foreign guests get down from their cars and are surrounded by a flock of beggars. 

Watch a documentary video on Bangladesh on BBC, CNN or Al Jazeera, you invariably come across a string of scenes capturing half-clad, skinny and unkempt men, women and children living in squalid slums spread along both sides of a railway track. None will claim that they are fake stories.

Lately Bangladesh has become an international pariah. It faces intense scrutiny due to high rates of application rejections and irregular migration. This is because, according to their estimate, one of every seven people that get drowned in the Mediterranean Sea in a bid to get to Europe is a Bangladeshi. Many hapless fortune seekers also die in African jungles. A country that has any sense of dignity cannot let its citizens die like rats on foreign soil.

Hyperbole is perhaps something oriental. It gives way to fantasy. We fondly love to call Dhaka University ‘Oxford of the East’ though it obtained 584th place in Times Higher Education (THE) ranking in 2025. However, our inflated ego was badly punctured when recently Singapore Ministry of Manpower considered a bachelor’s degree from Dhaka University equivalent to a foundation course. Professor Dr ASM Amanullah Ferdous, the Vice Chancellor of National University, Bangladesh, is reported to have said that he is not only the VC of the largest university of the world in terms of the number of its student population but also of the largest ‘jobless creating factory’. 

If the number of hospitals and clinic increases, that is taken to be an index of progress in healthcare regardless of the quality of their service. Meanwhile, thanks to neglect of Awami League government and due to campaign against immunisation by some Islamic outfits during Interim administration, measles has staged a comeback.

Currently the whole country has turned into a hunting ground for predators. According to the Asian News Network, every nine hours a woman is raped in Bangladesh. Clearly it has acquired the nature of an epidemic. From a five-year old to an octogenarian none is spared. Who is going to be the next prey and where, you never know. What is extremely frightening is in many cases the victims are killed. 

Another form of most abominable crime has been increasingly coming to light which is rape of both male and female students in qawmi madrasas. A very recent data reveals the fact that 123 female students aged between eight and twelve and 233 male students were raped by their teachers. This seems only the tip of a gigantic iceberg.  We wonder how a society has lived so long with so much dirty linen in its religious school system. If respect for women and love and affection towards children are deemed as basic norms of a civilised society, Bangladesh no doubt has reached its nadir. Had Jonathan Swift, the author of ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ lived in our time, he would in all probability, have alluded to us as “the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth”. 

When poverty, corruption, injustice, illiteracy and moral decline persist beneath the surface, material advancement becomes less a reality than an illusion of progress.