Bangladesh charter for welfare state
As per the Constitution, Bangladesh must be a welfare state with quality health and education services to be ensured by the state, said noted personalities at a book launching ceremony in the capital yesterday.
Local chapter of German foundation Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (FES) jointly with Dhaka University's Centre for Genocide Studies organised the ceremony in the capital's Cirdap auditorium to launch the Bangla translation of Foundation of Social Democracy.
The book presents the complex ideas of social and economic wellbeing of people in a simple way and is ready to become a popular reading in Bangladesh particularly for politicians, labour leaders and right activists, said Prof Rounaq Jahan, a noted political scientist and a distinguished fellow at the Centre for Policy Dialogue.
The idea of public welfare in pursuance of the ideals of social democracy has been an integral element of Bangladesh's nation building since the Liberation War, said Syed Sultan Uddin Ahmed, assistant executive director of Bangladesh Institute of Labour Studies.
But political parties have moved away from the economic spirit and political ideals of the Liberation War, and the people in power now view it as a “seditious exercise” if one calls for establishing public welfare in the light of the ideals, he said.
The 150-page book, already translated in English, French, Spanish and Portuguese, dwells on, among other salient issues of social democracy, a comparative state of social democracy in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden and Japan.
Bobias Gombert and others involved with FES headquarters in Bonn and Berlin, first edited and compiled some scholarly essays on social democracy in German and published the compilation in a book in 2009. The first international edition of the book was published in 2012.
Prof Imtiaz Ahmed of Dhaka University conducted the event where Shadhan Kumar Das, programme coordinator of FES, and Henrik Maihack, resident representative of FES, also spoke.
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