EDITORIAL : THE DAILY STAR, BANGLADESH

 

Poverty reduction

Integrated approach imperative

The most important aspect in fighting poverty is to ensure that once one emerges out of its vicious cycle one is helped to keep out of it on a permanent basis. And that what makes the issue of sustainability of the poverty reduction initiatives the prime concern to those that are seized with the issue of alleviating poverty in the country. And indeed this was the focus of a roundtable discussion at The Daily Star on Saturday on the impediments to ensuring poverty alleviation programmes are seen through in order to deliver.
However, the issue of sustainability of poverty reduction programmes is largely predicated on a number of factors, several of which emerged from the discussions that we feel the policy planners should factor in while formulating strategies in this regard.
It is very important that we do not waste time in grappling with the definition of poverty but instead take it for what it is, that it is a state of deprivation of resources; and it must be acknowledged that poverty is not a singular construct but that there are various strands of it with inequality cutting not only vertically but also horizontally.
One must also take a very critical look at the issue of social safety nets. Admittedly, this arrangement exists in various forms even in affluent countries. But given that there are more than eighty social safety nets programme running in Bangladesh, these being merely a stop gap or holding action programme that simply maintains the status quo. But the effort should really be to help the poor graduate out of poverty. In other words, the programmes must be geared towards their becoming a part of the income generating process by making them a subject of the programme and not its object.
It must also be recognised that no initiative can be successful unless it is dovetailed to the national anti-poverty plan and for which the issue must be shorn of political colour and tackled as a national concern where the ownership of the strategy and the programmes that will help operationalise the strategy is shared by all cutting across party line.

 

Caning students, still!

Prohibition should work

The office assistant of a high school in Sharifpur union of Jamalpur Sadar upazilla has been beating up twelve students of the school. In effect, the individual in question caned the students because they were creating commotion in a classroom next to the one where he was taking a class. Now, of course it is troubling when young people in school create a noisy atmosphere and so disturb the proper working of the school. It is only to be expected that they will be disciplined. What is of grave concern here is that, firstly, the office assistant was in a class where he should not have been and, secondly, that he adopted corporal punishment to bring the recalcitrant students to heel.
Obviously, the office assistant was in the classroom because of a shortfall of teachers. The rules of an educational institution do not permit, even when there are no teachers, an office assistant or any other administrative staff from doing the job of a teacher. One is therefore perplexed as to why the school authorities allowed the individual in question to be in the classroom in the first place. As to the second point, that of the caning of the students, one must ask the school authorities why they still permit such barbaric methods to be applied to students. On a larger scale, we cannot but note that in rural Bangladesh, there are yet teachers who do not balk at employing corporal punishment to students if the latter are inattentive to their studies or create disorder in the classroom. Physical punishment of students goes against all norms of civility and simply undermines the foundations of learning by the young.
We understand that the office assistant in question has been suspended from his job. His behaviour should now impel the education authorities into inquiring into the prevalence of corporal punishment despite a prohibition. The aim of education is the creation of an enlightened citizenry. Caning the young is a simple, sad way of suggesting that the negative is normal.