BANFAN and F6_Turbo have posited two opposing views, allow me to chip in with some of my own:
Re: the Government being the cause of all our ills.
Creating an 'us' and 'them' (i.e. the Government) dichotomy is overly simplistic. If we are to seek the root causes of poverty in Bangladesh we'll find that the State in its manifest forms are not the only (and I'll argue not the main) players. What we see in the news is some Government minister whisking away a few crores in his Pajero or another State Minister pocketing significant funds intended for the use of infrastructure projects. So on and so forth. Is that the cause of Bangladesh's slow development and continuing poverty? Somewhat.
What about the role of unscrupulous, profit-hungry, unrestrained companies? They feature too. Some businessmen have been responsible for siphoning several crores and destabilising the economy - not to mention treating their employees like crap. To be fair, many of these same businessmen are also known faces in politics.
So, what do people do? They turn to 'NGOs', 'charities' and civil society organisations, with the belief that they offer a welcome relief to the corrupt Government-corporate nexus and a way of 'sending poverty to the museums'. Increasingly, this illusion is crumbling too. Stories of Jahanara Begum's tin roof being stripped because she failed to pay her khisti in time or Latifa Banu's beating at the hands of her husband because she failed to hand over her loan to him might elude headlines as it isn't as news worthy as a ponzi scheme or a lurid governmental imbroglio but it is also an endemic reality; a reality that is obscured due to media firestorms and foreign, donor-fueled propaganda. We must ask ourselves this - we have weak State structures and NGOs and similar organisations provide stop-gap, replacement services. As valuable as they have been in some cases, who are they accountable to? They must be substantively accountable to someone, as no organisation is infallible. Also, is their media adulation healthy? To what extent does their presence hinder the strengthening of requisite State institutions?
There are myriad causes of our country's poverty - financial, social, political, etc - and it is misguided to lay the blame on any one group. There are many nexuses involved. A Government-corporate one, a Government-donor one, an NGO-donor one, an NGO-corporate one and a Janus-faced media one: all of which amount to a small group of closely linked people screwing over the general population AND are responsible for our persistent negative image abroad.
Re: asylum seekers. I feel that Western nations can adequately insulate themselves from economic migrants. European and American countries have rigorous asylum processes and while you have the occasional story like the one Mufi shared, the genuine cases are often picked out from the dubious ones. (If they weren't you wouldn't hear those stories of Bangladeshis drowning in the Mediterranean trying to get to Greece/Italy or dying in the Sahara in their attempt to get to Spain/Portugal via Morocco) At the same time, I hate to hear 'azul' (sic) Bangladeshis abroad getting on their high horse about corruption and illegalities in the motherland when they subverted an entire immigration and citizenship system and lied copiously themselves!
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