Send mobile clinics to hard-to-reach CHT areas
Due to remoteness, many areas of the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) remain beyond the reach of healthcare and education, speakers told a discussion yesterday.
Until the communication infrastructure is improved, the authorities should arrange for mobile clinics and distant teaching services in those places, they added.
Lawmaker Fazle Hossain Badsha said, “The region has immense potential for agriculture, but farming will not develop without adequate cold storages with electricity supply.”
However, industrialisation is not desirable, he said. “Land grabbing and eviction of the residents will multiply, if industrialisation sets in.”
The discussion, “National Budget 2015-16: Imperatives for CHT”, was organised by Unnayan Shamannay at The Daily Star Centre in the capital.
Commenting on the national budget of 2014-15, he said there should be a review of how Tk 735 crore allocated for the region was spent.
In his keynote paper, Mahfuz Kabir, senior research fellow at the Bangladesh Institute of International and Strategic Studies (BIISS), said although the National Agriculture Policy 2013 stressed introduction of “appropriate technology for the region", there was no project aimed at developing that technology.
Chairman of the parliamentary standing committee on the CHT affairs ministry, Obaidul Muktadir Chowdhury, said a Tk 380 crore project had been taken for development of communication infrastructure there.
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