My Village (short essay)

Bangladesh is predominantly an agrarian country. Therefore 80% of Bangladesh's population lives in villages. Hence it becomes important that proportionate amount of attention and funds be spent for betterment of the rural folk. But in spite of their being in majority, they have been lagging behind in the fields of education, civic amenities, medical facilities and economic well being. So the Government of Bangladesh realizes the need of improvement of condition of rural people. Many programmes and projects for the upliftment of rural folk have been started.

So in all, there are many such programmes aiming at the rural upliftment, but what all they need is proper infrastructure and a proper system of monitoring and evaluation. Then, there is no doubt that socio-economic reforms can uplift the rural masses from their present position. The soul of Bangladesh lays in villages and in these villages live three-fourths of our countrymen. It means that the nation's strength and prosperity are interlinked with the strength and prosperity of the villages. Hence, it is important to free the rural Bangladesh from backwardness and poverty. It is a good sign that our government is trying its best to bring rapid and sustainable development in the rural areas.

Education and removal of poverty are given top priority. Efforts are being made to enable the rural people to improve their living standards. Clean drinking water is very important for good health which is being made available in the villages. Our villages are no more poor and dirty as they were in past. They have their own primary health centres, post offices and the schools. We see a revolutionary change in the methods of farming. Farming is no more done by plough and oxen. Now tractors are being used for this purpose. There are tubewells which irrigate the fields. There are harvesting machines which reap the crops. The farmers also know much about the fertilizers. They use them in ample measure. Thus farming has now become easier.

No doubt rural Bangladesh has progressed a lot with better roads, better drainage system, better electricity facilities, better houses, but still much more has to be achieved in order to make it ideal in the true sense of the term. We see poverty, we see unemployment, we see malnutrition etc. in the rural areas more than the urban ones. These are the factors which hamper the growth and development of the villages.

The progress of a nation solely depends upon the progress of its rural areas. We can say that the rural areas provide the feed back to a nation:

Mother language is the language that is used by the people of a country to express their ideas, thoughts, feeling and emotion. Nobody can deny the importance of mother language. The 21st February is the internatonal mother language day. To recognize the sacrifice of our language martyrs, UNESCO declared the day as International Mother Language Day, on November 17 in 1999. Our mother language day has a glorious historical background. The then Pakistani rulers wanted to impose 'Urdu' as the state language upon us instead of our mother tongue, Bangla. In 1952, Mr. Jinnah, the then Governor General of Pakistan declared that 'Only Urdu and Urdu shall be the state language of Pakistan. But the heroic sons of this land protested it. The students brought out a procession on 21 February in 1952 and the police opened fire on the procession and Salam, Jabbar, Barkat, Rafiq and many other students died. Now, this day is observed as International Mother Language Day in all the member countries of UNO. We can uphold the glory of the day by creating an atmosphere congenial to the advancement of our mother tongue and fostering the very spirit of Mother Language Day.

Historically, Information Communication Technologies (ICT) has been facilitating the public sector managers to achieve good governance in terms cost effectiveness and economic efficiency. This paper argues that the ICT is not simply an effective mode of economic efficiency but in addition, it is equally and effectively capable of ensuring the legal process; check on public managers in policy implementation, and catering the need of public involvement and participation. In last few decades Information Communication Technologies (ICT) got the attention of public administrators as a facilitator for good governance, along with private sector applications. In private sector as E-commerce or in public sector as E-governance, the main focus has been on the refinement in the business process model and economic efficiency. The pre-dominant aspects of cost effectiveness, efficient delivery of services or customer satisfaction, were of an economic orientation. The concept of good governance as E-governance by utilizing Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) has been contouring around the values i.e. cost effectiveness and efficient delivery of service. Historically ICT has been utilized as an effective mode of e-governance for economic efficiency. This research will explore, in addition, ICT is equally and affectively capable of ensuring the legal process; check on public managers in policy implementation, and catering the need of public evolvement and participation. The role of ICT as tool of good governance, in the E-governance has lot of convincing best practices. The economic values, the market driven business component of governance is very much evident in the prevailing E-governance models. The rapid development, deployment and proliferation of the new and emerging information and communication technologies (ICTs) herald new opportunities for growth and development in countries around the world. Governments worldwide are seeking to harness the potential offered by these new technologies to create new dimensions of economic and social progress. Immediate challenges relate to the need for requisite efforts by Governments to aim at transcending the digital divide by narrowing the digital gap through incrementally (i) putting in place the necessary national information infrastructure; (ii) developing and nurturing the necessary human resource to operate the national information infrastructure; and (iii) providing adequate financial resources to implement both the infrastructural and human resource requirements. The enthusiasm for realizing the potential of ICTs is often dampened by the barriers to successful implementation. The first task in using ICTs as a tool to improve governance is to ignore ICTS altogether and focus on selecting and prioritizing improvement goals that are urgent or important. Once the most important goals are established, senior level policymakers must establish milestones that will indicate that the project is on track. The next step is to review alternative solutions to the problem given constraints on financing, infrastructure, literacy and skills. Each solution must be associated with costs of infrastructure, training, etc. and benefits. Once a solution is accepted based on the planners' estimation of its merits and costs, a detailed work plan must be developed, with provisions for adequate training and capacity building.