a) The education curriculum in BUET needs to change to reflect the reality of the world. In BUET the emphasis is more on education and discipline rather than on making the students ready to face the real world. We studied accounting or management with an objective to pass the exams, rather than learn how this may help us in our practical life.

In BUET the students are far away from reality. Every student enters BUET with a dream of working in a government organisation and to become Chief Engineer one day. By the time they graduate, the hope of becoming Chief Engineer vanishes. On the contrary there is no intentionÊto join private sector for various reasons like uncertainty of job, no career progression in most of the private sector organisations and manipulation by many private organisations (not all).

b) On the contrary, the garments sector in Bangladesh is run mostly by owner managers (correct me if things have changed in the last couple of years). Although the working environment has changed to some extent with pressure from the buyers, this is not definitely something which will attract young talents from good reputed universities. Although many garments industries at the moment are paying handsome salaries to foreign experts (Mr. Anisul Haque has mentioned this), the salaries of the locals are very low. The majority of the locals are paid just enough to survive in poor conditions. SinceÊBangladeshis do not have opportunities to explore out of the country (our national identity does not attract most of the employersÊabroad), they have to work under such conditions.

The garments sector has progressed a lot in the last one/two decades.ÊHowever, it is definitely a question for the experts like Mr. Haque Êas to how much they have invested in the development of Human Resources in Bangladesh ? How much professionalism they have brought to this industry ? How many full time professionals are working in top positions in the garments sector?

Other questions like why did not we take adequate measures to develop backward linkages etc. etc. are being discussed every day in newspapers without proper answers.

I think a few suggestions that BUET/RMG sector can jointly consider are as follows:

a) Bring in professional management and structure in the RMG sector. We need to give hope to young potential managers about their future in the sector.

b) Introduce better salary and benefits for the local professionals in line with the profitÊpotential ofÊthe industry.

c) Look for productivity improvement which is a key to survive in the face of increased competition from China and others. One way of doing this is to expose the sector with best practices and introduce benchmarking with other big players.

d) Identify the bottlenecks of the sector and agree to settlements within the industry for industry specific issues .

e) BUET authorities should really look into how best they can serve this nation. It is no longer enoughÊto just produce the best students, we need a good manager engineer who can cope with not only technical needs but also managerial needs.

The RMG industry is the backbone of our economy and we all need to make sure that this industry survives.