Inam Ahmed

Who is BB fooling?

Two things come easy in Bangladesh -- getting big bank loans and blissfully failing to repay. The money in the vaults seems to be the easiest prey today.

Private Armed Guards: Firearms law flouted at will

Many private banks and influential individuals are illegally employing armed guards in violation of the firearms law.

Janata going BASIC's way

Janata was almost a sound bank, the best among its state-owned peers until last year. It saw a dramatic fall in just six months since January this year.

It was the cabinet's oath-taking night after the 2001 parliamentary elections. The phone rang in the newsroom of The Daily Star. On the other end of the phone was the quivering voice of a man who, in his Dhaka University student days, was an infamous “armed cadre” of a political party.

Crown to crime

He was hardly known to outsiders until his father, General Ziaur Rahman who became Bangladesh's president in the process of several coups and counter-coups, died in another military putsch in May 1981. Through a Bangladesh Television programme, the countrymen, eventually came to know of Tarique Rahman. And today, he is facing life term as the court verdict goes. From the crux of political power he now lives the life of a fugitive.

Licence of lies

It is a piece of paper full of lies and yet it is the legal government document that allows a person to drink alcohol in Bangladesh.

Debt trap?

Devoid of the whims, high-handedness and the Cold War propositions of the bilateral and multilateral donors, smaller countries had found a new source of financing in China. Its funds could be easily tapped without being imposed with the harsh conditions like those of the World Bank and the IMF

The 14-year illustrious journey of Galleri Kaya

His Bhootergoli home seemed like a tubular, elongated chamber; dark and air heavy; dimly lit even at night. But it always gave the feeling of an art gallery.

Tenth, toughest

As we understand, budgets are drawn up to prioritise where to spend money and how to do it. It is also about how to collect that money. The end result would be growth, prosperity and a people better equipped to face the tomorrow.

ROHINGYA: A forgotten people

It has been exactly six months when the Rohingyas started streaming into Bangladesh to escape the ethnic cleansing in Myanmar and it took exactly the same many months for the world to forget them, to make them truly nobody's children.

Licence to rape

As women narrate their stories of shame– of how they were raped repeatedly by Myanmar army to the media, the case becomes even more convincing for UN special representative of secretary general to put soldiers on dock at the ICC in Hague, as she promised. Only one problem, and not a small one at that, may throw the spanner in the wheel – that Myanmar is not a signatory to the Rome Statute to the ICC.

Solving Rohingya Crisis: After India, it's China's turn

When Indian External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj said during her Dhaka visit that Bangladesh-India relation “goes far beyond a strategic partnership”, that certainly created a ripple across many fronts – from global politics, to the Myanmar generals to the hapless Rohingyas.

UN's Bosnia promise forgotten in Myanmar

After the shame of Bosnia, there should not have been a Myanmar. Yet, Myanmar happened because the big nations on both sides of the East-West divide have rendered the UN an ineffective organisation, a platform to talk and not to take actions.

A cruel mockery of 'Never Again'

1994 should have been a watershed year in human history; a year to feel ashamed of humanity's failure to stop a genocide that resulted in the deaths of 800,000 mostly Tutsis in Rwanda; a year to mend the mistakes that allowed the atrocities to happen, and to build solid defence against such atrocities in the future; it should have been truly a year of re-learning the lessons from death and destruction.

Myanmar's Proposal: All that glitters is not gold

Myanmar's promise to take back the Rohingyas, who have taken refuge in Bangladesh, looks empty and seems to be a tactic to ease international pressure. This is reflected in the contents of a hasty statement put on the official website of State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi hours after Myanmar Union Minister U Kyaw Zeya concluded his Dhaka visit.

Don't let Myanmar go Rwanda's way

It has been over three weeks that the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres had issued a letter, unprecedented in the last 28 years since the 1989 Lebanon conflict, to the Security Council for its action on the ethnic cleansing in Myanmar.

Water: Garments’ invisible price

Bangladesh boasts as being the world's number two garment exporter. Every third European has a T-shirt made in Bangladesh on his back. Every fifth American wears jeans manufactured in Bangladesh.

A friend in need is a friend indeed

Two years ago, Bangladesh felt a “strengthened bond” with India that “would benefit people of the two countries as well as of the

Too little, too late

Although it came quite late in the series of events, the UN Security Council statement Wednesday just reminded the world how terrible

So low, so fast

Seldom, if ever, in history has a world hero fallen so fast into disrepute. Never have so many people and organisations representing

Caught in the thick

Indian Premier Narendra Modi's stance on the Rohingya issue has emerged as another example of how the plights of the ethnic

We, the 'Amm-public'

I am a 'Janagon'—an 'Amm-public'. If you still don't get it, then let me spell it out for you, because I know you are an 'Amm-public' too—the ever-so-celebrated mango people. I hope you now realise who I am as well as who you are.

The Myanmar Cauldron: Birth of Arsa

The Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army or Arsa, an armed group that emerged in Rakhine state in 2013, has no sizable weaponry to sustain the struggle. But that is how things remain in the beginning – small but potent.

News Analysis: Nobody's people

The latest wave of Myanmar's killing of Rohingyas and the preceding world reaction to the continued genocide happening in the Southeast Asian country have truly put these hapless people at the risk of complete annihilation.

'Best' bank put in a sticky stew

By all indicators it was deemed to be the best performing bank in Bangladesh, posting a profit of Tk 2,300 crore last year, leaving any

TEARS for taxpayers

Year after year, the government has been allowing this easy scheme of plundering our banks -- a group of politically well-connected people will stretch their long arms and take loans from state-owned banks with all kinds of shady schemes. Then they will forget to pay back.

Big target, tricky route

Mega dreams require mega shake-ups, sometimes crushing ones, especially if you have little control over costs and transparency. Finance Minister AMA Muhith's proposed budget has come with the same impact -- putting the people through the VAT machine to take out every mint possible to be spent on a budget that is bigger by a quarter than the present one.

Beneath The Shine

Bangladesh is caught in a limbo between dreamy possibilities and the nitty-gritty of reality. The possibility of moving at a much faster rate is tempered by the grim reality of the current architecture that denies that speed.

GENOCIDE 1971: Govt moves to get UN recognition

At the end of his ruthless massacre and war against an unarmed people, General Amir Abdullah Khan Niazi who led the Pakistan army in the killings, described the genocide of Bangalis in his book “Betrayal of East Pakistan” as “a display of stark cruelty more merciless than the massacres at Bukhara and Baghdad by Chengis Khan and Halaku khan or Jallianwala Bagh by the British General Dyer.”

The Circus Story

Shahin is no Priyanath Bose. Nor does his outfit come anywhere near the Great Bengal Circus. Yet he is carrying forward the legacy of circus in Bengal through thick and thin.

The high price of the World Bank’s blunder

It is incredulous that the World Bank, with its expertise on almost anything under the sun, failed to understand through its legal departments that the so-called evidence was all moth-eaten and flimsy.

Padma bridge: Bank's big bungle

It is incredulous that the World Bank with expertise on almost anything under the sun failed to understand through its legal departments that the so-called evidence is all moth-eaten and lame. This one single incident will have dented the organisation’s standing in the eyes of the nations.

Analysis, Donald Trump, US election 2016

Analysis: He made a fool of the world

The bafflement and bewilderment among the saner heads are now widespread as the US election results show Trump has triumphed.

News Analysis: Should innocent too suffer?

We will never be able to feel his pain and trauma. We will never know his helpless nights in the dungeon of the jailhouse.

Opinion: Tahmid’s nightmare

We will never be able to feel his pain and trauma. We will never know his helpless nights in the dungeon of the jailhouse. Because even the strongest empathy will fail the experience.

DISASTER written on the wall

As a debate rages over the Rampal power plant and its impact on the Sundarbans, a substantive amount of information is available for us to reach some conclusion. The plant may have a far-reaching impact on the world's unique mangrove forest.

Not merely a forest but life

The land mass that rose from the sea bed from the siltation of two mighty rivers, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra, supports a

Uber taxis to hit capital within weeks

For Dhaka commuters, taxi woes may be over soon.

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Uber to launch taxi service in Dhaka soon

For Dhaka commuters, taxi woes may be over soon. Uber, the global taxi service company, is all set to hit the Dhaka roads within weeks. With Uber taxis plying around, Dhaka’s commuting experience will change forever.

Bangabahadur, indian elephant, Bangabahadur passed away

It's murder

The day he floated into Bangladesh from Assam more than two weeks ago, his fate was sealed.

Jim Corbett's leopard trail

I could swear it was the same market and the same bridge where the man-eating leopard used to stroll 90 years

BCL desire all too disturbing

So politics is going to enter the private universities, which so far remains outside the realm of student politics that has

Opinion: Is BCL a panacea for militancy in private universities? Not at all

So politics is going to enter the private universities, which so far remains outside the realm of student politics that has emerged so acrimonious and often violent. The announcement by Bangladesh Chhatra League to form committees in all private universities to fight militancy has made us all worried.

Opinion: Baffled by police stories

In the last few days we were baffled by police versions of various crimes. Take the latest murder of Police Super Babul Akhter’s wife Mitu’s murder.

Big dream, grim reality

Finance Minister AMA Muhith has really dreamt of a big budget in every respect -- from expenditure to revenue generation. And he no longer wants to live in the 6 percent GDP class to push beyond 7 percent. But his big dream promises to put extra pressure on people across the board, as he plans through his VAT and other tax proposals to extract that extra penny from every pocket.

'Mega' challenge

In the stumbling block of concrete mess at Moghbazar, Minhaz Abedin waits patiently every day, worrying about his unemployed son, something he has been doing for the past three years now.

At the heart of Superjumbo

If you have ever had the opportunity to fly on the Airbus A380, the biggest jetliner in the world, nicknamed the Superjumbo, then you would love to know that the enormous engines, each producing around 70,000lbs of thrust, of these double-decker planes may contain a critical set of technologies invented by a Bangladesh-born scientist, RifatUllah.

Jam? What jam?

Surprise, surprise! Why are these headlines – Traffic goes haywire, City chokes on jam and so on -- hogging the newspaper pages? So what if the cars stop dead on the streets? Well, I did not feel anything and I crisscrossed this small city and reached all the spots on time yesterday! What was wrong with all these people!

March 13, 2016

Dangerously exposed

The recent hacking of the Bangladesh Bank system to steal at least $100 million reveals the vulnerability of the central bank's IT infrastructure, weak operational architecture and probable insider link. The heist also puts to question what kind of network architecture and firewall it has in place. Everybody is talking about malware injection into the BB system but nobody is asking how the malware could enter the supposed-to-be most robust and secure system of a central bank in the first place.

December 20, 2015

16,000 tea workers face uncertainty

Hunger brought them here. They slashed and cleared the jungle, braving snakes, tigers, and malaria and set up the tea estates.

November 26, 2015

[WATCH NOW] Journey to the source of Matamuhuri river

Of the hundreds of rivers in Bangladesh, only two rivers -- Sangu and Matamuhuri -- have originated from Bangladesh. Both rivers are located in the southeastern hilly part of Bangladesh.

November 24, 2015

Lies and audacity

We can react two ways at Pakistan's expression of 'deep anguish' at the hanging of two war criminals – Salauddin Quader Chowdhury and Ali Ahsan Mohammad Mojaheed.

November 23, 2015

Pak reaction: Lies and audacity

Pakistan shows audacity by meddling in our domestic affairs is beyond any reason. It has no business to say anything regarding our dealings with the war criminals. And it lies about 1974 tripartite agreement among Bangladesh, India and Pakistan to deliberately confuse people.

November 9, 2015