Commentary by Mahfuz Anam: A dehumanising year

Along with the world Bangladesh also struggled to make sense of the all-pervasive disruptions caused by Covid-19. Again, as the rest of the world, we in Bangladesh struggled to rebuild our society, our economy, our education system, our basic services, in fact every aspect of our lives as far as possible. What we failed to do, as the rest of the world, was to hold on to our human values as we heard thousands dying and saw our near and dear ones perish and we could not come to their aid or even express sympathy in person. It was psychologically debilitating. The very fabric of society appeared to tear away, reduced to family-based islands of desperate and isolated microcosms of society surviving, interacting and somehow living out our lives courtesy the internet, the lifeblood of the virtual world.

As the world economy stood shattered and thousands died in countries that we thought had a robust health system, we did not know what was in store for us. Given the density of our population, level of health consciousness, living conditions and nutritional level and development challenges, we feared the worst. We are usually at the receiving end of nature's wrath in the forms of floods, cyclones, etc., but this time around nature appears to have worked in unknown ways to save us from the severest impact of the current pandemic.

It remains a mystery as to what worked for us. Was it our early immunisation programme, our peasants' and farmers' natural immunity, Vitamin D from exposure to the sun, our lifelong struggle with pollution of all sorts, our natural resilience? We are quite unaware of why Covid-19 did not wreak havoc upon us, and remain happily ignorant. Most other countries would have, by now, conducted a plethora of research as to why, and would have known by now what worked for us and built on that natural immunity to save us from its more lethal mutated variety, which we are now hearing about.

The question of the moment is with what learning we are entering the new year.

First and the foremost is building a robust health sector. Public health infrastructure needs a massive refurbishment in terms of operational efficiency with affordable and reliable health services for our people. Judging purely on the basis of infrastructure, we are in a position to extend effective healthcare for a majority of our people. There are 13,500 community health clinics at the union level, 421 health complexes at the upazila level, 64 full-fledged hospitals at the district level, tertiary level major hospitals at every divisional headquarters including 35 specialised hospitals spread all over the country. Added to this there are 5,321 private hospitals and clinics and 9,529 diagnostic centres, 106 medical colleges (36 public and 70 private). For a population of 170 million, this facility may not be adequate but for a country like ours, this national health service capacity makes for a formidable base to build on.

What we desperately lack is service delivery, whose focus is people and not simply machines and buildings. We know of successive governments' efforts to keep our doctors at the location of their work, an effort that has not succeeded. However, during the pandemic, we saw a totally different level of commitment and awareness from our frontline healthcare workers. We need to build on it.

If we are to tackle this pandemic effectively in 2021 and prepare for the ones that have been predicted by the director general of WHO, we must shift our focus purely from infrastructure building to providing service. This requires a massive transformation of how we operate, how we think, how we manage, how we budget, how we spend and how we value our health service doctors, nurses, specialists and the technical staff.

There have been several instances of corruption and waste in handling the current health crisis. Government is rightly preparing for mass vaccination for which it will dole out huge amounts of money. Given our past experiences, we cannot rule out the possibility of corruption, waste, misuse and mismanagement. We must take preventive measures now.

Our second learning deals with the education sector. The pandemic has truly exacerbated the already existing digital divide. Clearly, those who had, could handle and could get accustomed to the new technology got some learning done during this period compared to those who could not – meaning the poor, who got totally left out of the learning loop and for them 2020 was, for all practical purposes, a lost year.

While the digital divide became more acute, it is in e-learning where the solution lies. We believe that the existing school, college and university level education, which is based on classroom-based face-to-face learning, needs an overhaul. In the future, a large number of students gathering every day for the full duration of their session may not be feasible and not even advisable. As some educationists are suggesting, we should form a "blended" approach, which is a mixture of the existing class-based education with a high degree of digitisation.

This will require massive investment, retraining of our teachers -- a highly difficult and so far mostly unsuccessful undertaking -- equipping our schools, colleges and universities to make the best use of this technology and finally preparing the necessary educational material, the software, for a proper education of our students.

The prospect of digital education is enormous. Think of how the latest educational materials -- both nationally and internationally produced -- can be made available to the lowest level of our schools at the same time as it becomes available to the best of them. Also think of all the educational aids that can be made available to our poor and differently-abled children. All our schools can have the same level of education if we can do it properly. But for that our teachers need to be retrained -- no easy task.

An important change that we need in our higher education is putting the necessary emphasis on research. Our universities, now numbering hundred or more, public and private combined, spend very little money on research. Here the government has to come forward and start funding innovation and creation of new knowledge, which can only be done through research by both students and the faculty. We simply cannot overemphasise the need for original thinking.

The third takeaway is that we will have to hugely strengthen our IT infrastructure for the economy, education, health, transportation and, most importantly, good governance. Our internet has to be high speed, cheap and uninterrupted. IT is no longer a technology, an industry or a growth sector; it is our new way of life. Smart devices will have to be affordable and widely available. The policy framework will have to encourage local production of most of these items, which we are capable of. Our start-ups are already making impressive headways in ways that give us tremendous confidence in their abilities to break new ground in this highly competitive and exciting area.

In this field we must invest in artificial intelligence (AI) and biotechnology and their interface. The future revolution will be a mixture of these two disciplines. We must start seriously looking to them right away.

My final takeaway would be that we take a more comprehensive, multi-sectoral and effective action-oriented plan on climate change. A new 10-year climate change strategy is in the offing. As planning goes, this one will also be striking the right notes and highlighting the appropriate priorities but while implementing, we may repeat the same miserable records as in the past. While we rightly blame the big polluters of the world for the current miserable state of affairs, we fall terribly short in doing things that we need to for our own survival. Polluting, encroaching and dumping chemical waste into our rivers is perhaps the biggest and most dramatic example of the gap between our words about saving nature and deeds of destroying it.

The new year and the new decade that we enter today confronts us with totally unknown challenges. It is almost like teaching us how to live our lives and build our societies all over again. More fundamentally it is teaching us to rebuild human relationships and how we are to interact -- something that we have been doing for thousands of years but will have to do differently now.

In this "new normal" what new things are we learning to do? It is the same politics, the same blame game, the same "all mistakes are done by others", the same "we know everything", the same "othering", the same custodial deaths, the disappearances, the same arbitrary arrests, the same gagging of the press and the same self-certification galore. Can such habits both of the mind and functioning of our system serve us in the New Year that is desperately crying out for new thinking, new attitudes, new values in facing the new reality?

Wishing all our patrons, advertisers and, most importantly, readers for staying with us and supporting us in every way possible. Hoping that the New Year will bring greater happiness and success, both in personal and professional life. A very happy 2021.