Education, research and innovation talents must be valued

Jamaluddin Bari 

Over the first four decades after independence, Bangladesh suffered instability, and over the following decade and a half, it suffered under Awami misrule pursuing an agenda of Indian cultural-political, economic, and total hegemony — and the sectors most damaged by this were the country’s education system and its constitutional and economic institutions. If the current government and political parties do not, through united effort, allow the political rehabilitation of the Awami League, Bangladesh will still have to bear the effects of that fascist misrule — which began in 1972 and ended through the mass uprising of August 5, 2024 — for many more years. We must remember that independent Bangladesh, achieved through the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of lives in the Liberation War of 1971, is the only exceptional state entity in this subcontinent where language, culture, geography, and religious belief and tradition have come together in a unique, mutually contrasting blend. Because of the near-universal single language of the population and the shared religious belief of about 92 percent of the people, Bangladesh had the potential to be a true nation-state — but this potential was suppressed through the blueprint of Indian hegemonism.

Bangladesh is the finest example, in regional geopolitics, of how a crisis can afflict a nation when the boundaries of its education system and cultural self-identity are run according to another country’s blueprint. Although hundreds of thousands of students graduate with certificates every year from the country’s hundreds of universities, colleges, and specialized institutions of higher education, they are unable to supply the skilled manpower needed for the country’s production system and service sector. This is a highly abnormal and irrational reality. On one hand, hundreds of thousands of highly educated young people are desperately searching for jobs across various government and private sectors; on the other hand, people coming from neighboring countries through illegal recruitment processes are seizing high-paying jobs in the country’s major export trade and IT sectors, siphoning off tens of billions of dollars from the country every year to take back to their own countries.

Not only from India, but also from Sri Lanka and China, people have come and taken jobs in various important sectors, making us dependent on foreign skilled manpower. In a country whose principal economic strength lies in exporting manpower abroad to keep remittances and economic flow moving — where educated young men, unable to find jobs at home, cross dangerous seas to do odd jobs in Europe, America, and Africa, where thousands of young men going abroad illegally are caught by police and coast guards and forced to endure inhumane conditions in foreign prisons — in that very country, young men from neighboring countries come on tourist visas, take jobs illegally, and live in comfort. Far from identifying, arresting, and imprisoning these illegal foreigners, there has never even been any word of deporting them. Illegal Indians are not merely weakening our economy from within — they have become a major security threat to the country. Indian agents residing in the country, along with associates of the fascists who have fled to India, are now jointly engaged in conspiracies against Bangladesh.

The connection between Bangladesh’s agriculture, industrialization, trade, and technological capacity on one hand and the education system on the other is very weak and unplanned. Yet in the overall development framework and action plan of a nation-state, there is supposed to be a deep connection and coordination among education, culture, and the security system. In the country’s education system, institutions of higher education have become factories producing educated unemployment. The education policy, curriculum, and the skilled and qualified body of teachers and experts needed to develop human resources equipped with modern language and technological skills, as well as social-cultural values and ethical standards, were never given attention.

This is probably the greatest failure and recklessness of our state in post-independence Bangladesh. Even so, though delayed, the possibility is never entirely lost. Despite various constraints and adverse realities, our workforce, farmers, teachers, researchers, technologists, and innovators, working at home and abroad, continue to leave marks of astonishing talent. Many young people who, unable to secure admission to a good public university or even a minimally respectable job at home, emigrated to Europe and America, have gone on to leave commendable marks of talent at various universities, research institutions, and corporations in the developed world.

The Bangladeshi diaspora, in every corner of the world, is demonstrating the skill to advance in step with the regional socio-economic mainstream. Because of the lack of a proper educational environment, insecurity, unemployment, and similar reasons, people who left the country — and their families — have been able to set numerous examples of unprecedented contributions in education, research, social service, and political-economic fields in various countries of the world. In the 1960s–70s, when Bangladesh’s own Mr. Fazlur Rahman Khan became renowned in the United States and the Western world as the architect of some of America’s iconic high-rise buildings — the John Hancock Center, the 110-story Sears Tower, and the Willis Center — Pakistan’s President Mr. Ayub Khan hired the Estonian-American citizen Mr. Louis I. Kahn to construct a new parliament building in Dhaka’s Agargaon. While the architectural style of our National Parliament Building, designed by Mr. Louis Kahn, earned worldwide acclaim, the fame of Mr. Fazlur Rahman Khan — the Bangladeshi architect who built the Sears Tower and Willis Center and pioneered tubular design for high-rise construction — was by no means less than that of Mr. Louis I. Kahn.

Among the three co-founders of YouTube, one of today’s major social media platforms, is Mr. Jawed Karim, who is of Bangladeshi descent. Mr. Karim was essentially the inventor of YouTube, and the first video ever uploaded to YouTube, “Me at the zoo,” was his own video. The contributions of Bangladeshi youth to the technical and cinematic achievements behind many of Hollywood’s famous films have been reported in the international media. In various Hollywood studios, Bangladeshi youths Mr. Wahid Bin Reza, Mr. Nafees Bin Zafar, Mr. Rashed Zaman, and Mr. Asif Iqbal have earned acclaim and won awards for their cinematographic skills, special visual effects, and animation work. In nearly every field, thousands of potentially similar talents remain unemployed, wandering jobless within Bangladesh. Just as it is essential to stop the laundering of money out of the country, the state must also make an effort so that the country’s talented children, after going abroad for higher degrees and training, can return home and contribute to the nation’s development.

The people of Bangladesh have, for a thousand years, carried the tradition of conquering nature to live well. The farmers of this land are, by nature, hardworking and possess innovative capability. Post-independence Bangladesh witnessed the catastrophe of severe food shortages and famine, with an epidemic of deaths among hundreds of thousands of people. In light of that experience, we took up the challenge of ensuring food security for a growing population on shrinking agricultural land — and succeeded. Our farmers, agricultural scientists, innovators, and cultivators have left marks of enviable success in every sector.

Over the past five decades, our farmers and cultivators have managed to increase food production in step with population growth. A silent revolution has taken place in Bangladesh in the production of rice, potatoes, onions and garlic, ginger, mangoes, jackfruit, guava, and various other domestic and foreign fruits. Alongside this, the country has achieved self-sufficiency by increasing the production of fish, poultry, and livestock. Failure in this area could be regarded as a very grave danger and threat to our national security. During Ms. Sheikh Hasina’s era, over a decade and a half, everything was handed over to India unreservedly, without India even having to ask. The trade deficit with India rose to the highest level in history. Yet whenever a food shortage crisis arose in the country at various times, India would halt food exports to Bangladesh or impose additional tariffs, destabilizing commodity prices.

For purely communal political reasons, when India stopped cattle exports to Bangladesh, Indian Hindutva politicians declared that Bangladeshis would be forced to stop eating beef. But Bangladesh took up that challenge from Indian Hindutva advocates and succeeded. After the halt of cattle and buffalo imports from India, over the past nearly one decade, domestic farmers have achieved extraordinary success in meeting the demand for beef, whether during Eid-ul-Adha or throughout the year. In continuation of this, there has also been substantial growth in the production of milk and dairy products. Through the united effort of Bangladesh’s students, teachers, farmers, workers, and laboring people, any crisis can be overcome — this has been proven again and again in our national history. To thwart this potential, the country’s education system was rendered dysfunctional alongside political division, instability, misrule, economic plunder, and the destruction of all constitutional institutions.

Under the fascist narrative, well-educated and patriotic people were humiliated, deprived, and subjected to various forms of harassment. In particular, devout people identifiable by beards and caps, holding different political identities, were labeled as fundamentalists and militant terrorists and harassed through false cases. By restraining the majority population from religious observance, Indian hegemonic cultural dominance was imposed — so that the people of this country could not take pride in their own identity and religious-cultural heritage, so that they would suffer from inferiority and self-loathing, and would accept Indian dominance and remain silent.

In a country or society where merit is not valued, meritorious people are not produced. During the one-and-a-half decades of Awami fascism, patriotic knowledgeable and accomplished people in Bangladesh had to endure boundless humiliation, disrespect, and suffering. It was not only those who believed in Islamic values — the country’s promising talents, geniuses, researchers, innovators, and technologists were also persecuted and humiliated in various ways. Among the researchers who created a revolution in rice production is the geneticist and rice researcher Dr. Abed Raza, who lamented in an interview given in 2017 that if, instead of researching rice, he had written poetry about rice in this country, he would have been recognized as an intellectual.

A Bangladeshi researcher named Mr. Nazmul Huda, in the 1990s, held a press conference to present a perpetual motion theory for generating electricity from water. Although that inventor was offered tempting deals by corporate organizations from various countries, he did not accept them. However, neither the country’s government nor any corporate organization extended a hand of patronage to him. He passed away a few years ago, still carrying that regret. As people around the world, seeking to escape the growing dangers of global warming and climate change, increasingly turn from polythene and synthetic products toward natural fiber products, Bangladeshi innovator Mr. Mobarak Ahmad Khan invented “Sonali Bag,” a biodegradable polybag made from jute cellulose, as an alternative to polythene. If that innovation were properly utilized, it could build a billion-dollar market worldwide. Another Bangladeshi scientist, Dr. Maksudul Alam, led the team that announced the sequencing of the jute genome in the early part of the last decade (in 2013). The country’s Prime Minister seized on the news and publicized it with considerable fanfare, but did little to permanently establish the recognition and dignity of his achievement. One year after the announcement of the jute genome sequencing discovery, in 2014, Dr. Maksudul Alam quietly passed away.

Dr. Jamal Nazrul Islam, one of Cambridge’s notable scientists, who was a colleague and source of inspiration to Mr. Stephen Hawking, left behind the glamorous life of London and America and, drawn by his roots, moved to Chattogram. Our state and society seemingly failed even to recognize him. He too passed away quietly. Far from properly valuing so much talent before our new generation of students, this state seems more interested in burying the immense achievements of the nation’s proud children. It is hoped that the representatives of the new Bangladesh, following the July uprising, will carry forward new dreams and possibilities before the nation, presenting our new generation with the wings of new dreams inspired by talent, wisdom, and patriotism. And may no scientist, innovator, artist, or entrepreneur ever again have to leave the country — or this world — carrying such regret. The nation’s finest children are not only politicians. They are spread across every sector. They must be evaluated and given their rightful place in history.