Browncast: Abhinav Prakash and Karol Karpinski

Those are good questions and it’s a shame I didn’t cover most of them on the podcast! In my defence, it’s been the first podcast I’ve ever been on, so I didn’t realise how important it is to be economical with words.

The one under-appreciated trend is that after 1971 Bangladesh started gravitating more towards SE Asia, which is only natural if you look at the map. Pre-covid, you’d have a single daily flight to Kolkata, but at least a dozen to KL/Bangkok. In the same fashion, integration with ASEAN (FTA negotiations started the other day) seems to generate more excitement than WB.

That said, there have been some initiatives: there are cross-border trains between Kolkata and Dhaka, and Kolkata and Khulna, as well as a bus service between Kolkata and Agartala (crossing Bangladesh). The take-up hasn’t been great, though. Some problems in the cross-border cooperation I can think of would include:

– some big-ticket political items, like the Teesta River waters dispute
– Bangladesh’s highly centralised system of government, which means that e.g. the three western divisions cannot really get involved in cross-border projects of their own
– there are some cultural factors at play. To simplify things somewhat, some Bangladeshis feel that some Indians behave in a condescending way and take Bangladesh for granted, or think that India is still the only game in town without noticing that the neighbourhood has really changed over the past 50 years. On the other other hand, there is also a fair amount of petty, defensive nationalism on the BD part—for example, some time ago a few high school girls faced a torrent of online abuse for giving a BBC Hindi Service reporter an interview in that language (as opposed to Bangla or English). All of that hurts the trust you need to build things across the borders.
– for organisations providing international development assistance, the country is still the primary unit of analysis, so real cross-border projects take the back seat. Since international aid still matters quite a lot for Bangladesh, it gets reflected in the priorities on the ground. It’s slowly changing (DFAT in Australia was probably the first one to emphasise cross-border projects; the World Bank has been following with the “One South Asia” brand), but for now it’s still mostly reflected in the changed narrative—real tangible cross-border projects are scarce.

I generally sense that multilateral arrangements like BBIN or SAARC are somewhat easier to sell in BD than purely bilateral cooperation. Although, I guess, at the end of the day WB’s own economic performance might be the most important variable: if Kolkata were India’s Shenzhen, none of the problems I wrote about above would prove to be insurmountable.

I don’t know if I can say much about differences between WB and BD. I travelled quite extensively around BD, but have only been to Kolkata; I also don’t really know many people in WB. With those caveats, here’s some things I remember:

– Dhaka feels more Bengali than CCU—at least downtown, I couldn’t be sure that a random passerby would speak Bangla, while that would be unimaginable in Dhaka—since 1971, even the Biharis or Adivasis pretty much speak Bangla as their first language (perhaps except some in CHT). Overall, I feel that the BD govt is more serious about preserving and promoting the living Bengali culture, but that’s just my vague impression.
– WB is IMO cheaper if you make a like-for-like comparison for a middle class lifestyle. The necessities—food and clothing—are IIRC cheaper in BD, but anything more: schooling, medical care, gadgets, cars—are more expensive. Healthcare is actually the one thing where the gap between BD and WB is still massive: Dhaka’s top hospitals (United/Apollo) are at the level of a rural district general (+the latter is to a large extent Indian-staffed anyway). The ICDDR,B is a top research institute, but beyond that people just rely on medical tourism to India and Thailand.
– It’s speculative, but I think that international migration is not such a big thing, culturally, in WB. In BD, on the other hand, you can pick a random village and you’ll run into somebody with family in the Gulf/SE Asia/Korea/Japan/HK/England/Europe/US. Remittances are a really big thing for the economy as a whole.
– I don’t think WB has got any equivalent of BRAC. Like, of course, there are NGOs, but BRAC in Bangladesh is a completely different thing, like a crossover between a government agency and a massive corporation. It’s just incredible—again, you land in a random village and there’s a BRAC school, a BRAC branch office or a BRAC cooperative. And if you’re an urbanite, you often end up banking with BRAC Bank, getting your MBA from BRAC U, drinking BRAC milk for your breakfast and eating BRAC chicken for your lunch, and taking your s.o. to shop at Aarong, the BRAC department store. I haven’t seen anything like that anywhere else in the world. That also means that there is an independent service delivery channel with great ground game that can be used for things like vaccination campaigns.
– Alcohol is easy to get in WB, but that means the West Bongs miss on the speakeasy culture, which may be the most interesting thing about Dhaka!

As for less freedom in 2020 v 2010: I’d say that ten years ago atheism or gay rights were still—however unwelcome—parts of the public square, now we’re in the “don’t ask don’t tell” territory. The murderer’s veto worked. If you look at places like Mukto-Mona, most names will be pseudonymous or based abroad.

I’ll be out of my depth talking about education—it’s not really my area of expertise (though my Dhaka flatmate was an education specialist). Hiring good teachers and paying them well would be a good start, but that can be said anywhere in the world. IMO vocational education + apprenticeships need more attention. I would probably tinker with exploring how those and migration policy could work better together (and I know some smart people are thinking about that too).

Another one- https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/china-migration-rural-return-xi-economy-11605632518