Spotlight | The Daily Star

  • A River Dies in Kurigram

    “Is there a river called Jinjirum that’s a trans-boundary river? Are you sure about its name? Is it the name of the locality or the river? I haven’t even heard about it,” says a high-ranking official of the northern zone of Bangladesh Water Development Board (BWDB), when we asked him about different issues faced by this river and the communities dependent on it.

  • WHY ARE FACTORIES DEEMED UNSAFE STILL OPERATIONAL?

    When the Accord and Alliance signed on different brands from all over the world after the Rana Plaza collapse in 2013, they pledged that the factories that these brands will do business with will ensure safe working conditions for the workers.

  • Beyond the pitch

    16-year-old centre back Akhi Khatun's talent caught the attention of scouts when she played in the 2014 edition of the Bangamata Primary School Gold Cup. She was soon enrolled in the Bangladesh Krira Shikkha Protishtan, or BKSP, and called up for the U-14 team playing at the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) women's regional championship in Tajikistan in 2015. The girls won.

  • An epic saga of loss

    Once upon a time, in the winter of 2014, in a land far far away—Sundarbans—a young man in his twenties, seeking adventures...

  • Audacity Of Hope

    During the 1971 Liberation War, Khurshid Jahan, a 21-year-old student of Bagerhat PC College, Khulna, started training as a freedom fighter under the guidance of Lieutenant Zia Uddin.

  • For whom the bell tolled

    Simeen Mahmud was an accomplished researcher working on issues of women's empowerment, women's work and labour force participation, and gender norms in Bangladesh. A statistician and demographer by training, Simeen was educated at the University of Dhaka and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. She was also a MacArthur Fellow at the Harvard Centre for Population and Development Studies.

  • Place-ing CHOBI MELA X

    It all starts with contact with light. The process, as we know, requires light to seep into the lens in which the moment captured already exists.

  • The Layoffs

    On January 12, Jubayer walked to his factory with his fellow workers to find his name and face up on the walls of the factory. He has since been unable to enter the factory and terminated from work.

  • Pot of Gold - At the end of the 300 feet road

    On January 28, the High Court ordered 38 housing projects around Purbachal New Town to temporarily stop all land-related activity being conducted. To be more specific, this activity included plugging up water-bodies, filling lowlands with sand, and clearing out vegetation.

  • Rehabs in need of rehabilitation

    On February 6, 2016, 27-year-old Shariful Haque died of pneumonia after being given an ice bath treatment by the doctors of his drug rehabilitation centre in Pabna.

  • The story of a floating people

    14 Bede families have set up their oval-shaped makeshift tents on private land in Natun Torki, a village in Kalkini Upazila of Madaripur district. A branch of the Arialkha river flows on the west of Natun Torki. The area is well-known in Barishal for Torki Bandar, a narrow but flowing river on the west. The Bede huts are just on the outskirts of the crowded Natun Torki market.

  • Post-mortem of a worker's death

    “Look, just look how happy and innocent he was,” says Hashi Begum as she hands me a mobile phone and points to the photo gallery.

  • A Fatal Diagnosis: Cancer treatment in Bangladesh

    It was around 12:30 pm when we reached the office of the director of National Institute of Cancer Research and Hospital (NICRH). After a half hour wait, the director called us in.

  • WHERE WERE ALL THE MISSING POLLING AGENTS?

    After a whole day of observing the elections, the one common observation made by journalists at The Daily Star and media elsewhere was this—there were no Jatiya Oikko Front polling agents in sight, and barely any of the leftist parties as well.

  • To the polls and beyond

    This is the year when Bangladeshi millennials are eligible to go to polls. Star Weekend talked to young voters, many of whom will be voting for the first time, to understand what they think about the electoral process. The young voters also shared their hopes and aspirations regarding the upcoming polls, what issues they truly care about, and whether they will go to vote at all.

  • Free and Fair Coverage

    During the Dhaka City Mayoral elections of 2015, Samakal's senior reporter, Amitosh Paul, was assigned to cover the polling booth at the Uttara Girls High School Centre. Inside, he noticed a group of men—belonging to the ruling party—misguiding a section of the voters.

  • No Woman's Land

    Hamida Begum's* husband had beat her yet again. But this time was different. He had also uttered talaq three times, essentially divorcing her according to the Islamic customs of the Rohingya community.

  • Dear university, are you listening?

    On November 20, an undergraduate student of BRAC University (BRACU) lost his life in the university's residential campus, referred to by students as TARC, in Savar—according to official accounts, he succumbed to his injuries on the way to the hospital after jumping from the fifth floor of his dormitory.

  • The Burden of Proof

    While most women who have undergone sexual abuse hide behind anonymity for fear of social reprisal, dance student Priyanka Rani Devnath emailed all the news organisations and called a press conference to talk about the violence she had undergone.

  • Flammable Existence

    For 20-year-old housewife Ripa, it was a usual weekend morning. Her one-year-old daughter Ayesha had woken her up at around 7 am and was repeatedly pointing to the window, wanting to go outside.

  • Chased by death

    On October 27, the Jatiya Sangsad passed the Narcotics Control Bill 2018 to replace the 30-year-old law from 1990. The new law has introduced the death sentence for people found to be in possession of over 200 grams of yaba, or 25 grams of heroin.

  • Inked in blood

    For Manik Chandra Saha, work always came first. It's not as though he never spent any time with his family, but there were few things that got the veteran journalist more excited than the possibility of a scoop. Unfortunately, that pursuit paved the way for his death.

  • Illusion of Inclusion

    Many are quick to state that the number of women in the parliament is actually higher because 50 reserved seats are kept for women for the sake of representation. However, experts argue that the 'reserved seats' are merely a token representation. Why is it that more women don't contest elections, and why aren't reserved seats equal to actual representation?

  • No place at the table

    The news of losing his waiter gig struck 35-year-old Nesar Ali like a bolt. Nesar, who had never taken a day off in his four years at the restaurant, took seven days' leave from his owner for his sister's wedding back in the village.

  • From the shores of hell & back

    “They thought I was dead,” Abdul tells Star Weekend. “I was stuck in a jail in Libya for over four months and I never had the chance to contact my family. They thought I had fallen from the boat [on the way to Italy from Libya] into the dangerous sea and disappeared forever,” he says.

  • Not even the bare minimum

    Renu Begum* can remember little of the life she had before she moved to Dhaka and joined a garments factory at the age of 12. Her father, a fisherman, had moved to Dhaka with his family in the early 90s. But there was not much an unskilled fisherman from the village could do in a city teeming with unemployed labourers who, like him, had migrated to the capital, dreaming of untold opportunities.

  • Startups - A success story?

    According to a Global Innovation Index report published in July 2018, Bangladesh is ranked 116th out of 126 nations, the lowest score in Asia—below India ranked 57th and Pakistan ranked 109th.

  • Murder in the camps

    More than 700,000 Rohingyas, who fled the genocidal military operations of Myanmar a year ago, are still living under constant threat of attack. Sheltered in 30 refugee camps in different parts of Cox's Bazar district, they are not vulnerable to Myanmar army's raid anymore. This time, they are being threatened by their own people.

  • Tea gardens brewing discontent

    The contract made between tea workers and tea garden owners expired last year. They spent the last two years fighting for their minimum wage to be increased from Tk 85 per day to Tk 230. This would have brought their monthly cash wages from Tk 2,550 to TK 6,900, which is approximately equivalent to the minimum wages of the ready-made garments sector.

  • How Assam’s citizenship test disowns its own people

    Sitting inside her hut in Alipur char in lower Assam, India, 37-year-old Delowara Begum tries to explain where she is from. “I have always lived here,” she says in a dialect of Bangla. “Sometimes there, a few kilometres away, when the river floods and my hut sinks. But never too far from here.”

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