NATION BUILDING IN BANGLADESH RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT

This volume takes stock of Bangladesh’s first decade and a half after independence and asks what kinds of institutions and political settlements are required to transform hard-won sovereignty into everyday dignity for citizens. The retrospective chapters reconstruct the early choices on constitution-making, language and identity politics, civil–military relations, and public administration, situating them within intense fiscal and capacity constraints. Contributors examine how famine relief, primary health and education, and disaster management gradually shifted from ad hoc heroics to more systematized state functions—identifying which reforms stuck and why. The political economy sections analyze rural transformation, land and tenancy, cooperatives and microfinance pioneers, and the rise of export-led opportunities, arguing that policy credibility and rule enforcement mattered as much as resource envelopes. A central thread is that resilience emerged when state, market and civic actors solved concrete problems together—cyclone shelters, vaccination, irrigation, food procurement—under conditions of radical scarcity. Moving from “retrospect” to “prospect,” the book offers candid reflections on weak points that still produced fragility: politicized administration, under-investment in local government, fragile justice delivery, and a thin accountability ecosystem. Rather than romanticize either scarcity or self-reliance, the volume advances a sober claim: nation building is a craft of compounding—competent routines, transparent rules and learning systems that reduce volatility across political cycles and weather shocks with predictability.