Provincial Bangladesh??

[Rabz]

Ershad advocates 8 provinces

Sat, Mar 13th, 2010



Dhaka, Mar 13 (bdnews24.com)—Jatiya Party chairman HM Ershad has proposed a system of provincial government in Bangladesh, dividing the country into eight parts.

"There is no other alternative to provincial government for the establishment of good governance in Bangladesh," he told a seminar in the capital on Saturday.

He proposed eight provinces: Northern, Barendra, Jahangirnagar, Jalalbad, Chattala, Mainamati, Jahanabad and Chandradwip.

According to the proposal, the provinces would each have a council of 600 members and a separate cabinet with a chief minister at the head. The central government would be a federal one.

Each province would have a High Court, which would function under the Supreme Court located in the federal capital Dhaka, said Ershad, a former president and martial law administrator.

The federal government would oversee the administration through a governor for each province.

"I am raising the proposal as a party chief, but it is not presented from the party's point of view," Ershad told the seminar on 'Planning a provincial government system in Bangladesh' at the Hotel Sonargaon on Saturday.

Source: http://www.bdnews24.com/details.php?id=155697&cid=3
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Atleast someone is talking real issue while others are busy drumming dead people.

I have always thought of this.
This would be a great way to decentralise our country and take the excessive burden off Dhaka's shoulder. This city simply can not sustain with the current load, which is only going to increase as day progresses.

By having provincial government, we could reach out to even finer grounds in the grass root levels and would bring about a new engine of growth within our country.

But i'm also afraid if we have enough skilled human resource to do that. Offcourse we have an abundance of it, but it does not necessarily mean they are capable enough to govern themselves.

Since Ershad is part of the ruling coalition, I'd like to think there is substance behind this talks.

[BD-Shardul]

নামগুলা সব মুঘল আমলের।

[Rabz]

I love those Mughal names.
It is a great reference to our heritage and culture.

[ialbd]

makes a lot of sense actually.... I wished all the resource/energy/time spent on changing the airport name went behind this...

decentralizing power/administration is the only solution at this point, Dhaka is on the verge of collapsing (if not a failed city already).

[Zunaid]

Ignoring the source - it is a great idea; There has always been talks of decentralization but nothing happens.

[magic boy]

Originally Posted by bd-shardul
নামগুলা সব মুঘল আমলের।

ঠিক...

হাসিনার আন্টির স্বপ্ন বাস্তবায়ন করতে তাই চাই ডিজিটাল নাম...যেমন : ক্যালকুলাস প্রদেশ

[_Rafi_]

Good proposal by Ershad. But that never gonna happen.
Constitution would need a massive change. And no government would want to face two election-provincial and central which will take away their absolutism.

[view360]

This is not a good idea and this will only benefit political parties who have strong regional base.
Creating a federal system with provinces will lead to powerful regional parties , devolution and eventual separatism . This is specially true if we intruduce provincial governments under a federal system in Bangladesh. Instead , keeping the current unitary state with more empowered municipalities can be a good solution if we really want decentralization. All Upazilas and unions can gradually be upgraded to empowered municipalties. Therefore, empowerment and expansion of the local government need to be done than adopting old faulty federal system.

[auntu]

খারাপ না।
লেজেহোমো পল্লীবন্ধু থেকে এখন প্রদেশ বন্ধু।

[Ashfaq]

Originally Posted by magic boy

ঠিক...

হাসিনার আন্টির স্বপ্ন বাস্তবায়ন করতে তাই চাই ডিজিটাল নাম...যেমন : ক্যালকুলাস প্রদেশ

There's nothing digital about calculous. Here's some digital province:

1. Province Nyquist
2. Province Mp3
3. Province DFT
4. Province DSP
5. Province Diode
6. Province Flip-Flop

.....you get the idea.

[BD-Shardul]

Originally Posted by Ashfaq
There's nothing digital about calculous. Here's some digital province:

1. Province Nyquist
2. Province Mp3
3. Province DFT
4. Province DSP
5. Province Diode
6. Province Flip-Flop

.....you get the idea.

Not everyone may be EE

[yaseer]

Originally Posted by Rabz

This would be a great way to decentralise our country and take the excessive burden off Dhaka's shoulder. This city simply can not sustain with the current load, which is only going to increase as day progresses.

By having provincial government, we could reach out to even finer grounds in the grass root levels and would bring about a new engine of growth within our country.

These are valid points for having a provincial Bangladesh.

The concern area to me at the moment is, there will be 600 more council members that means more corrupt+powerful people in grass-root level, so more difficult to handle them.

[auntu]

Originally Posted by magic boy

ঠিক...

হাসিনার আন্টির স্বপ্ন বাস্তবায়ন করতে তাই চাই ডিজিটাল নাম...যেমন : ক্যালকুলাস প্রদেশ

হইলো না।

কামাল, জামাল, রাসেল, রেহানা, হাসিনা এবং বংগবন্ধু - এই হলো ছয় প্রদেশের নাম। আশাকরি এবারের একুশে পদক আমার গলায়ই ঝুলবে।

[BD-Shardul]

Originally Posted by auntu
হইলো না।

কামাল, জামাল, রাসেল, রেহানা, হাসিনা এবং বংগবন্ধু - এই হলো ছয় প্রদেশের নাম। আশাকরি এবারের একুশে পদক আমার গলায়ই ঝুলবে।

আপনি ত ভাই দেখি চালু মাল।

[shaad]

Originally Posted by auntu
হইলো না।

কামাল, জামাল, রাসেল, রেহানা, হাসিনা এবং বংগবন্ধু - এই হলো ছয় প্রদেশের নাম। আশাকরি এবারের একুশে পদক আমার গলায়ই ঝুলবে।

auntu, almost. You just have to add -bad or -sthan as suffixes after each of your suggestions. Note how attractive that sounds -- Hasinabad, for example. And I suppose one could always change the name of the nation to the Federal Republic of Bangabandhudesh.

On a more serious note, my own views are similar to those of view360's. I believe we can arrive at the proper level of decentralization by empowering local upazilas and unions, without necessarily shifting to a federal form of government. And I don't think that we are anywhere near large enough, like say, the United States or India, for a federal form of government to benefit the nation. For that matter, I think a hard-nosed analysis of the disparate states (in terms of GDP per capita, poverty levels, unemployment levels, human development indexes, education levels and opportunities), of the states/provinces in those two countries (yes, even in the US) would also deter most of us from wanting the same for ourselves.

I think many of us who have been around for a while, and not limited our exposure to just Dhaka, are quite familiar with the sheer strength of certain political parties and individuals in different provincial regions. Some of these regions and provinces are ruled almost like personal fiefdoms. To a certain extent, given that we do have fairly regular if messy changes of power between the two ruling parties, the excesses of these provincial powers are kept in check by the (opposing power in) central government. In the absence of a strong, central, unitary government, there would be no such rein on these provincial powers. Do we really want that?

Then let us take the issue of religious persecution. I think most of us are familiar with the Gujarat riots of 2002 in our neighboring India, a country with a federal system of government, in which the Narendra Modi-led state government did little to stop the violence/massacre (in fact, some data suggests that they might have actively fomented and participated in it). I think, even without naming names, it is fair to say that people in some of our provinces exhibit more of this sectarian (communalist) or religious discriminatory sentiment than in others. In the absence of a strong, unitary, central government, what is there to prevent a provincial government from encouraging or acting on such sentiments?

What about the persecution of minorities? Would a loose federal system of government (which would, in this context, largely devolve to Chattala, the province containing CHT) necessarily deal better with the CHT issues than a centralized unitary government?

How would this federal government deal with say, hypothetical separatist desires in Jalalbad, the province containing Sylhet?

As a nation, we have been maintaining a GDP growth of greater than 5 per cent, and a resulting burgeoning middle class, which is surprising given that our recent governments have done very little to encourage such development -- it has come almost entirely on the backs of our private sector. However, I believe that in the relatively near future, to prevent our GDP from plateauing, we will need policies to build on and improve our infrastructure, policies that can best be implemented by a strong central government. Do we really want to shift to a loose federal government, where the attempt to introduce such centralized improvements in infrastructure will be opposed by the vested local interests of provincial governments?

Again, let me reiterate that I am not opposed to decentralization per se. I just think that there are better ways of bringing that about, of making the individual voter/citizen more empowered, than by shifting to a provincial form of federal government, one which will bring with it a whole slew of new problems, and one which I suspect was probably introduced as a notion by individuals with vested interests (note the makeup and the capital of Northern province, and the hometown of the individual who introduced the idea).

[view360]

I fully agree with the earlier post of Shaad. In addition , my perspective on this issue is that the practice of Risk Management process is virtually non-existent in Bangladeshi civil society. That is why we have cultivated a reactive public administration that only wakes up after something goes wrong. I would point my finger at the civil service which is full of so called 'meritorious' BCS cadres turned bureaucrats who learned nothing more than passing tests and exams.

[Tokai]

If it happens, I already know what the names will be:

Bangabondhu 1
Bangabondhu 2
......

You got the idea.

How dare you propose any other name?

[Zeeshan]

Originally Posted by Ashfaq
There's nothing digital about calculous

What do you mean there is nothing digital about calculus? Calculus along with Newton was invented by Leibniz who held a view that monads were the ultimate building block of universe.

Wikipedia further elaborates:

Digital philosophy is a modern re-interpretation of Gottfried Leibniz's monist metaphysics, one that replaces Leibniz's monads with aspects of the theory of cellular automata. Digital philosophy purports to solve certain hard problems in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of physics, since, following Leibniz, the mind can be given a computational treatment. The digital approach also dispenses with the non-deterministic essentialism of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory. In a digital universe, existence and thought would consist of only computation. (However, not all computation would be thought.) Thus computation is the single substance of a monist metaphysics, while subjectivity arises from computational universality. There are many variants of digital philosophy, but most of them are digital theories that view all of physical reality and mental activity as digitized information processing.

More...

[Ashfaq]

Zee, you know I'm an engineer right? Calculous may be a doorway to some metaphysical nirvana, but in my tiny knowledge digital mathematics, digital logistics are far removed from ideas of calculous in my line of Engineering. If I appear to be wrong to you, that's only expected.

Of course, if you look down deep enough, everything comes back to Calculous now a days. But that's not what I meant.

[Zeeshan]

Well it's not about "right" or "wrong" I was just extending a different perspective.

But tell me this why do you keep writing 'calculous'?

[BD-Shardul]

Originally Posted by ZeeshanM
But tell me this why do you keep writing 'calculous'?

British spelling may be?

[GoldenAsif]

As a proud Sylheti I can say that Ershad's idea is complete nonsense.

1. Creating now centres of power in a country which sees the abuse and mismanagement of power by either of the two main parties (BNP/AL) is not a good idea.

2. Bangladeshi politicians are greedy, corrupt and power-obsessed. Imagine having a BNP leader for a Comilla province with a AL central government in Dhaka?

3. What is needed is not federalization, which is not really possible anyway, but is diversification. Everything in Bangladesh is Dhaka-centred and this is creating problems for our national capital.

So for example we should outsource certain central government positions to Chittagong or to Jessor or Sylhet or where ever required.

India's political centre is Delhi, its economic centre is Bombay (deliberately spelt in the old way), its IT centre is Bangalore.

If Bangladesh's political centre was Dhaka (why not Sonargaon, our old capital, Pakistan, Australia, Canada, Brazil and Nigeria all have their political capitals in a small city or created completely new capitals from scratch?....I say this half in jest), and two economic centres were Dhaka and Chittagong, IT centre was {insert name} (Khulna, Jessore, Rangpur, Sylhet etc) and other cities had other things this would create a more equal distribution of jobs and resources and ease the burden on Dhaka.

As for Sylhet....a picture says more than a thousand words...for the idiots suggesting we are separatists, please look at this picture:

[Ashfaq]

Originally Posted by ZeeshanM
Well it's not about "right" or "wrong" I was just extending a different perspective.

But tell me this why do you keep writing 'calculous'?

I though that's the Original spelling, Turns out I'm wrong. The Latin etymology cancels the 'o' before the 'u'.