& çâÌæÚUæð´ ·¤è ¥ôÚU Îð¹Ùæ ÁæÚUè ÚU¹ð´ ¥ÍæüÌ ¥ÂÙð ÜÿØ ÂÚU ŠØæÙ ÚU¹ð´Ð ãæÚU Ù ×æÙð´, €UØô´ç·¤ ·¤æ× ·¤ÚUÙð âð ¥æÂ·¤ô ©gðàØ ·¤è Âýæç# ãôÌè ãñ ¥õÚU ÁèßÙ ·¤æ ¹æÜèÂÙ ÎêÚU ãôÌæ ãñÐ ÖÜð ãè ÁèßÙ ×ð´ ç·¤ÌÙè Öè ·¤çÆÙæ§ü €UØô´ Ù ¥æ°, çÁ™ææâæ ¥õÚU ©ˆâæã ÕÙæ° ÚU¹ð´Ð ŠØæÙ ÚU¹ð´, ÜÿØ ã×ðàææ ¥æÂ·Ô¤ Âæâ ãôÌð ãñ´ çÁ‹ãð´ ÂæÙð ·Ô¤ çÜ° ÂýØæâ ¥æÂ ·¤Öè Öè àæéM¤ ·¤ÚU â·¤Ìð ãñ´Ð

TO THE EDITOR
Let's face it
We are Bangladeshis, We know how to fight against any problem. This month bears testimony to what we are capable of doing. We were united in 1971. Shouldn't we be so once again?
Raise your voice against corruption. price hike etc. We will certainly come out victorious!
Montasir Mamun
Department of civil engineering BUET
Jamuna Bridge cracks The cracks are developing on the Jamuna bridge slabs very slowly. The cause behind the cracks is not definitely known. However there is definitely some kind of fault in the construction of this very big bridge. One striking feature of the bridge is the construction of the steel towers for the electric lines on the same side of the bridge as the railway track. Whether this put the slabs on unequal stress is best known to the engineers of the bridge. If it does, there should be longitudinal cracks parallel to the bridge slabs. Another important consideration is the geology of the site. It is now known that the Jamuna river more or less defines the line of contact of the Indian and Asian tectonic plates. The plates are supposed to be on continual slow movement all the time. If the Jamuna Bridge spans these plates, there should be deleterious effects on the bridge no doubt, as the slabs are placed on the columns constructed deep underground.
There should be continuous study on the bridge.
M. Fakhrul Islam Applied Chemistry Raj shah i University
Truth commission
As reported in your daily, the proposed truth and accountability commission (apparently being set up by the CTG ) would let the possessors of ill gotten money off the hook if he confesses to committing the crime and deposits the sum to the government exchequer. Independent of the question of commensurability of such a commission with the independence of the Judiciary, a confession to the commission closed doors is
unlikely to have the desired deterrent effect on the same or another potential offender. In this context it is worth considering an East Asian practice, especially in Japan and Korea, where the repenting offender is required to appear before the national television to ask for pardon publicly. This requirement might be of interest also to the ACC and the Judiciary for enhancing the deterrence effect on the practice of corruption, especially by the ’’respectable" practitioners.
Farhad Faisal On e-mail
AL strategy
I was just reading an article in The Daily Star (Friday March 21). It stated that the Awami League was planning to stage a street protest again price spirals. It is a good political move.
Emergency is still prevailing in the country, and the government will perhaps try to stop the protests. This new political tension will push up the prices further. The Awami League has a lot to gain at the expense of millions of people who are finding it increasingly hard to make the ends meet They will come out of this situation with a brighter image (they will have tried to protest apparently for the good of the people), prices will go up further and they will be in a position to put pressure on the caretaker government. What scares me most is that they are perfectly aware of what will happen, and I am disgusted at how they are using it shamelessly to their advantage. If the Awami League really wants the well-being of the people, calling off the protest will be the smartest thing to do.
Any high school economics student knows that the market is not governed by protests, rather by supply and demand. I guess the policy makers were all skipping classes!
Nuheen Khan
Dept. ofEconomics
University of British Columbia
Bangladeshi telecom engineers
Mobile communication has experienced significant growth in the
last couple of years throughout Africa. To keep pace with this giant market growth, the biggest mobile companies of Africa are relying mostly on foreign engineers. Many Bangladeshi engineers, those who were mostly working with different GSM companies in Bangladesh earlier, are now providing the highest level of professional services in the African market and earning huge remittance. Our motherland is known to be the place of natural disasters, political turmoil and other messy things. However, the days are not that far away when this stigma will be erased , and our beloved motherland wilt stand with its firm, esteemed and glorious image to the international community. The huge amount of population that is often seen as a burden can make significant difference if we just turn them to manpower.
Muhammad Tawhidur Rahman Senior Core Network Designer MTN-Nigeria
Why blame the doctors?
Case 1: A 50-year old man suffering from pain in the middle of the chest every night just before going to bed, which resolves after some time. He doesn't feel any kind of pain during daytime. He is moderately hypertensive and suffering from no other diseases. After consulting with his doctor the doctor prescribed him glycerol trinitrate to use when the pain starts. Then the doctor gave him some laboratory investigation. After investigating the doctor prescribed him to continue the same drug life long for that pain. But, the patient again consulted some doctors and they also prescribed him the same medicine. Although he is OK with this drug , he is still blaming the doctors, "The doctor told me to take this life long but why can't they cure it?"
Case 2: A 43-year old man was suffering from painful sore in his oral cavity for 5 days. After visiting a doctor, the doctor prescribed him riboflavin. After going to dispensary he exclaimed and said, “The doctor took Tk 300 from me while the cost of this medicine is only Tk 2!” The man went to another
doctor and got the same prescription. After taking the drugs he was fully cured.
Case 3: A 20-ycar old married woman was getting slight pain at the middle of the chest for 1 month. She also complained that the pain got worse at night. Then she visited a doctor. After performing a simple ECG the doctor prescribed him a drug. After taking the drug she was completely cured. But, some days .later someone told her that the drug was a multivitamin drug. She told, “What a doctor!"
Case 4: A 20-year old male got admitted into Chittagong Medical College Hospital after a road accident. He had a severe head injury. After CT scan the doctor said that there was no severe bleeding or other manifestation on the scan. Then the patient's guardian wanted to take him to Dhaka for treatment. But the doctor told them not to take him because before 24 hours nothing may be manifested in case of a head Injury patient. So, the doctor told him to wait. But, they refused and took him without the discharge report. And later the patient ultimately faced some manifestation as a result of injury to the base of the skull.
There are a lot of examples of these types and can you say what a doctor can do in these cases? We know the doctors are blamed when they fail to do something and the patient is often responsible for that. But they always blame the doctors. And I know very few people who praise the doctors even when they get good treatment.
Md. Hossain Rahman MBBS (5th year) Chittagong Medical College
Election 2008
Finally, we are going to have upazila election and general election at a time. The CEC is considering that option.
Our road to democracy or roadmap for election will have to cross a lot more road barriers before the actual election date is announced. I am not sure what final announcement we are going to hear from the EC on the election date.
In the midst of all these political manoeuvrings, we can still see the light at the end of the tunnel, provided two vital issues are addressed:
a. The government should immediately stop easy law making through ordinance. Enough is enough.
b. Either the EC shall stop meeting the media for the next 4 months before publication of the draft voter list or the media should voluntarily stop coverage of the EC activities. This will bring good results, as the EC will have peace of mind and can complete the voter list by next July. My good guess is that the EC has nothing new to tell us except complicating the pending issues further. Since nobody bothers about what the people are talking about, it is better to blackout contentious news, those which are not people friendly.
Press or media freedom is a misnomer and ineffective under emergency rules where the fundamental rights of the citizens are suspended indefinitely and the constitution is fighting for its survival!!
A reader One-mail
Essence of accountability The long political turmoil that was brewing over Bangladesh for decades finally ended up in the present fiasco. By now we know most of the covert and overt reasons of the gradual decline of our political system. The factor topping the dark list is the continual recession of government accountability in each fold of its activity. In strict sense, accountability means that public officials -- elected and unelected — have an obligation to explain their decisions and actions
to the citizens. The absence of such n transparency mechanism gives rise to many an irregular action, the foremost of which is corruption. Now that the closed vault has been forced open, we are appalled at the gargantuan volume of veiled misdeeds and corruption that got piled up over the years. Lack of government accountability lies at the core of such massive fraud and deception.
As the saying goes, the rot spreads from the head. The primary accountability begins with the political leadership that runs the government power wheel If the election process is decidedly free and fair, people's representatives understand that they are elected for a fixed term and they have to negotiate the next election where money and muscle will not work. They will be under obligation to remain above-board in discharging routine duties as they know that people may vote them out of office if (hey are not satisfied with their performance. Pitifully, barring a few, our elected representatives took resort to a sort of jungle law during their tenure in office on the strong presumption that they could craftily mould the electorate and manipulate election results. What we need in the first place is a flawless and dependable voting mechanism that will put an end to the anti-people trend.
Accountability of the public officials depends mostly on the activity of their political and line bosses in the fashion of a chain reaction. The volumes of codified rules and procedures carry little meaning; it is important whether the misdeeds perpetrated are deliberately allowed to go unnoticed and unaccounted. A recent revelation that a few low grade employees of a gas company had amassed money and property worth hundreds of crores benumbed us with immense curiosity and wonder. Would anybody believe that such a mammoth heist was going on over the years without the knowledge and patronage of the high-ups? Corruption epidemic has swamped even the narrowest corners of the entire social service and development sectors causing a loss of nearly 3% to the annual GDP. Many of the NGOs and private sector organisations have earned notoriety in corruption and malpractices in service dispensation. Only recently a number of NGOs have been identified as ruthless swindlers. The term 'Accountability' encompasses a much wider area and not limited only to political and public singsong; most private and autonomous agencies indulge in the same mean practice causing huge national loss and misery to the people. All these malefactors need to be disciplined and confined within their authorised bounds.
In fact, absence of accountability is an all-pervasive virulence cutting deep into the institutional fairness one way or the other. A mischief in whatever form is committed and the offender is not accountable to anybody albeit he is supposed to be. This is because the epidemic has infected all, from the highest to the lowest echelons. We feel ashamed of our steady relegation in the community of democratic countries. I quote a remark by Edmund Burke, "The individual is foolish; the multitude, for the moment, is foolish, when they act without deliberation; but the species is wise, and, when time is given to it, as a species it always acts right.” The time has come and the dark cloud seems to be drifting away. People in crisis, with deliberation and wisdom, have vowed to establish their inherent right to know and put questions and that will be the vital key to the creation of an accountable and efficient administration opening up a new horizon. The reformation is on, and we anxiously look for the better days to come.
Mohammed Nawazish Dhanmondi, Dhaka