
Eresh Omar Jamal
THE OVERTON WINDOW
The writer is a member of the Editorial team, The Daily Star. His Twitter handle is: @EreshOmarJamal
THE OVERTON WINDOW
The writer is a member of the Editorial team, The Daily Star. His Twitter handle is: @EreshOmarJamal
A sense of injustice being perpetrated against them by state actors is increasingly building up among the common people.
Moody’s, one of the big three global rating agencies, downgraded its outlook for Bangladesh’s banking sector from “stable” to “negative.”
Hostility between the two sectarian rivals has dominated Middle Eastern politics in recent years, spreading into Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen.
Mushtaq might have been the worst victim of the DSA, but he was not the only one.
Famed war correspondent John Pilger discusses the Russia-Ukraine war.
Despite overcoming its many economic challenges, one obstacle Bangladesh continues to struggle with is creating enough quality employment opportunities for its young population.
Unpredictability has become the new normal in a world afflicted by the forces of deglobalisation amidst rising geopolitical tensions.
Narayan Adhikari (Nepal country director and co-founder) and Sanjeeta Pant (programmes and learning manager) of Accountability Lab speak with Eresh Omar Jamal of The Daily Star.
From a neutral point of view, this world cup has also given us great moments that resemble David overcoming Goliath.
Stefania Maurizi, an investigative journalist working for the Italian daily Il Fatto Quotidiano, speaks to Eresh Omar Jamal of The Daily Star.
An unholy nexus of powerful people are protecting those who've stolen thousands of crores.
Many economists today believe we are committing one of the biggest economic blunders, which has brought ruin to countless past societies.
The burden of imported inflation and supply-side implications of reduced imports will have adverse implications for economic growth and welfare, particularly of marginalised people.
“It’s going to get ugly, the recession,” and there will be “a financial crisis,” Roubini said.
Bangladesh should immediately get into negotiations with energy-exporting countries to come up with favourable arrangements.
The lack of transparency in the energy sector is costing the nation dearly.
When global prices dropped, we did not see the energy prices go down in Bangladesh. Why is that?
The national energy crisis is a direct result of the corruption and nepotism encouraged by the indemnity law.
US-China friction over Taiwan likely to have worrying impacts on global stability.
Once again, the public must pay for the government's failure.
Ahsan H Mansur of Policy Research Institute talks about Bangladesh’s current economic crisis with Eresh Omar Jamal of The Daily Star.
There are two major economic problems that have been plaguing Bangladesh for a long time: Rising non-performing loans (NPLs), and money getting laundered out of the country.
Researching the plight of Indigenous people is a passion of mine because I am Indigenous.
Dr Hossain Zillur Rahman, executive chairman of the Power and Participation Research Centre (PPRC), discusses the proposed national budget for the 2022-23 fiscal year with Eresh Omar Jamal of The Daily Star.
One important but oft-ignored thing is that design and implementation mistakes delay the revenue-generation phase of megaprojects.
The number of risks that our economy currently faces because of all the global instabilities is perhaps unmatched since the early days of Bangladesh’s independence. Amid this reality, the government is set to present the new budget early next month.
The war in Ukraine is, in reality, a proxy war being fought between the West and Russia. Unlike its portrayal in the Western media, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was neither unprovoked nor unpredictable.
If we are to have an inclusive society, we can’t simply “cancel” those who we don’t agree with.
Sri Lanka is known as the country of smiling people because of their friendliness. But recently, the island nation has been experiencing an explosion of pain and anger.
While Covid-19 captured the attention of the world for the last two years or more, another pandemic has been silently killing countless numbers of people around the world.
According to a recent report, due to the insistence of lawmakers, the government is going to repair religious establishments and build new bridges across the country at a cost of Tk 5,132 crore.
Hossain Zillur Rahman, executive chairman of the Power and Participation Research Centre (PPRC), talks about inflation and the discrepancy between official and real data in a conversation with Eresh Omar Jamal of The Daily Star.
Dr Manzoor Ahmed, professor emeritus at Brac University and vice-chair of the Campaign for Popular Education (CAMPE) Council, talks to Eresh Omar Jamal of The Daily Star about a new book, of which he is a co-author, on the political economy of education in South Asia.
In a first-of-its-kind study, the Economic Relations Division (ERD) under the finance ministry found that around 1.6 million young people lost their jobs and about 20 million youths faced income loss due to the pandemic.
Over the years, experts have identified two major problems in Bangladesh’s banking sector.
Stefania Maurizi is an investigative journalist working for the Italian daily Il Fatto Quotidiano. She has worked on all WikiLeaks releases of secret documents and partnered with Glenn Greenwald to expose the Snowden Files about Italy.
Dr Iftekharuzzaman, executive director of Transparency International Bangladesh (TIB), speaks to Eresh Omar Jamal of The Daily Star about the discrimination faced by marginalised communities and the rise of fundamentalism in Bangladesh.
Dr Badiul Alam Majumdar is global vice-president and country director, The Hunger Project, and secretary of Sushashoner Jonno Nagorik (Shujan). In this interview with Eresh Omar Jamal of The Daily Star, he talks about the constitutional obligation of formulating a law to establish the Election Commission and why politicians so far have ignored it.
Dr Mehtab Khanam is Honorary Professor, Department of Psychology, Dhaka University, and a renowned psychotherapist. In an interview with Eresh Omar Jamal of The Daily Star, Dr Khanam talks about the state of mental health awareness in Bangladesh and how much it affects general well-being.
When we ask the question, “Who should development benefit?”, the answer should be quite straightforward: “the people.” But in reality, that is not often the case.
In a recent report, the World Bank stated that better targeted social protection programmes and reallocation of existing transfers to the poorest segment of society could reduce poverty from 36 percent to 12 percent in Bangladesh.
Today marks 20 years of the 9/11 attacks on the US masterminded by Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda and a bunch of “ragheads” (as angry racist US soldiers called them) sitting in some cave in Afghanistan, as per the West’s dubious official narrative of what transpired on this day.
Twenty-years after 9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan by US and NATO forces, the US is on the cusp of withdrawing its forces from the proverbial “graveyard of empires”, with the US military claiming its withdrawal is more than 90 percent complete.
As of now, the US and Iran are yet to conclude their talks in Vienna “on the terms of Washington return(ing) to the [Iran nuclear] agreement,” according to The Guardian.
On May 27, The Daily Star reported that detectives had claimed to have seized LSD, an extremely potent hallucinogenic drug, for the first time in the country during a raid in Dhaka.
On May 19, the finance minister said, “The scope [to whiten black money] will be there as long as undisclosed incomes will be there.” (The Daily Star) Before commenting on this statement, let’s take a step back and think how we got to this point.
In a report published on May 1, this newspaper revealed that according to a recent study, the Covid-19 treatment cost is abnormally higher in private hospitals compared to public hospitals.
The ongoing pandemic has caused huge economic losses for the world. In 2020, growth in South Asia contracted by 5.4 percent, which does not capture the whole story of how terribly its people have actually suffered—but it is an indicator of how the region has struggled over the last year.
For this year’s World Health Day, the World Health Organization wanted to highlight the importance of building a fairer and healthier world. In terms of fairness, how do you rate our healthcare system? And when it comes to ensuring a healthy population, how would you rate its performance?
One of the less talked-about downsides of the pandemic-induced lull has been the increasing financial stress on the Bangladesh Power Development Board (BPDB). According to a study last year by the Ohio-based Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis,
The reason behind the creation of the concept of Least Developed Countries (LDC) by the UN in the 1960s was to identify a set of nations whose development struggles were not solely based on their own shortcomings, but due to other structural constraints.
It was good to hear the High Court blasting a section of Bangladesh Bank officials for their alleged connection with financial scams involving People’s Leasing and Financial Services Ltd (PLFSL), a non-bank financial institution (or NBFI) that is now in the process of liquidation due largely to the infamous PK Halder and his associates.
After liberation in 1971, Bangladesh faced massive economic and humanitarian challenges right from the get-go. The country was born through struggle, but the struggles were nowhere near over as its economy was quite simply in tatters after the war—and even from before.
Bangladesh is no stranger to disaster management. Since independence it has dealt with numerous natural disasters as well as political unrest and overhauls.
The year 2020 has been like no other in recent history. Even the biggest doomsdayers could not have predicted what was to occur, and how the Covid-19 pandemic was to derail millions, if not billions, of dreams and aspirations.
On the occasion of International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, the Ambassador of the State of Palestine to Bangladesh, Yousuf S Ramadan, talks to Eresh Omar Jamal of The Daily Star about some recent major developments concerning the longstanding occupation of Palestine by Israel and the forces that are contributing to the denial of Palestinians’ human rights.
As the nation holds its breath in anticipation of a potential second wave of Covid-19, five countries including Bangladesh have decided to strengthen sharing of information and coordination of policies and actions to cope with its probable impacts.
The year 2020 has been a disappointment due to the Covid-19 pandemic. And just one of its many downsides can be seen on the global economy which, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), is set to contract by 4.9 percent in 2020—with the IMF saying in its June report that this “baseline projection rests on key assumptions about the fallout from the pandemic.”