Our villages are in need of rejuvenation, in every sense of the meaning. In our race toward urbanization, an experiment which has often led to cities being unable to cope with the innumerable pressures brought on by projects and by the influx of citizens from the rural regions, we have quite relegated our villages to second league status.
Ours being an agrarian country, despite all the industrialization that has gone on, it is of vital importance that we remember this unassailable truth. Let us begin with an acknowledgement of reality, at the core of which is the thought that a major segment of our population yet wallows in poverty. Go around the villages dotting this land and what you will stumble into is hovels peopled by the desperately poor.
That is a reason why education is today a paramount requirement in our villages. But the first necessary step toward achieving that goal is to have the children of these poor families, those who go to primary school or should be going there, taken care of by the state. Begin with a resumption of midday meals at the schools, which themselves are often rundown structures where poorly paid teachers go out on a limb to educate the young.
The priorities ought to be clear. If the state can expend such massive resources on planning and implementing mega projects, it is only natural that demands will arise for it to look to its poor students, not just in a few villages but in villages in every union in the country. A midday meal is a godsend for poor parents, for they are too deprived of the bounties of existence to ensure the welfare of their children.
And so policymakers in the nation's capital ought to turn their attention to this basic issue --- educating the poor and the deprived. Midday meals will be an inspiration to these children, to those who have dropped out and will make it back to the classroom again. And with that must come guarantees of salaries that will have teachers lead lives removed from the ceaseless worries which have kept them impoverished and unable to focus on the children in their care.
In these past many decades, little thought has been expended on the need for land reforms in Bangladesh. Not since the days of Bangabandhu's government has there been any measure geared to such reforms --- limiting the size of land holdings and administering rural cooperatives --- in the rural regions. The consequences have therefore been disturbing.
While the affluent have increased the volume of their landed property, there have been those among the poor as well as middle class who have seen their fortunes decline either because they have had to sell their land or have been owned landed property of an inconsequential nature.
In Bangladesh, with its cultural and social traditions rooted in its villages and hamlets, a surefire indicator of progress will be the focus placed on rural development in national planning strategies. One ought not to forget the historical truth that in the War of Liberation it was largely young people from our villages who made their way to the battlefield and came back home triumphant. Many did not return, having perished in battle.
The victory achieved in 1971 was a revolution with its genesis in our villages. More than a half century after that December afternoon when Bangladesh emerged as a sovereign nation-state, it becomes the sacred responsibility of the state to return to such basics. Education and land reforms are but part of the strategy we need to adopt to revive the dynamism of our villages. There are other measures needing to be given the highest consideration.
Digital technology has certainly transformed the communication landscape all around the country. The positives are all out there, but again, there are the negatives one cannot overlook, particularly in the villages. Mobile phones are a ubiquity in the rural regions, with young men and women having taken to them like fish to water. But since water can often be polluted and muddied through much use, one needs to step out of it to restore its brilliance.
For the young and indeed for the elderly as well in the villages, intellectual pursuits are a huge need. The easiest way of guiding the young toward such pursuits will be through setting up libraries in schools and colleges and at union level in all the districts of the country. Nothing can better prepare the young to handle the future, for themselves and for their nation, than studies of literature, politics, biographies, history, science, mathematics, the environment.
It would be naïve to expect our children and grandchildren in the rural regions to read works on these subjects on their own, because they are not economically empowered to purchase books and read them at their leisure.
In our People's Republic, therefore, it becomes the supreme responsibility of the state to have books made available to school, college and union libraries in order to enable the young to comprehend the nature of a world they share with billions of others on the planet.
When an old man dies, so goes an African proverb, a whole library burns to the ground. One might now suggest, in approximation to such profundity of experience, that when traditions are neglected and heritage is cast to the winds, it is a village which is left bereft of its life force.
In Bangladesh, the jatrapala, bhawaiya, bhatiali, jaari, shaari and puthi were the roots which deepened our hold on life and portrayed our image as a rich emblem of humanity on the global stage. These roots need to be watered again, cared for and revived in our villages.
For the state and for our public intellectuals, a revival of Bangladesh's pastoral glory necessarily comes associated with a drive, a well-laid out movement for a reassertion of these historical traditions.
On a mundane and yet absolutely essential level, the roads, many of them in dilapidated circumstances, snaking through our villages need not just repair but wholesale reconstruction. Culverts need to be built and those in bad conditions call for proper maintenance.
There is this final thought: let our villages, in terms of agricultural richness, not be commandeered by ever-expanding urbanization. In a number of instances, the damage has already been done, but in what remains undefiled by town and city-centred encroachment, definitive laws need to be formulated towards a preservation of our villages.
The countryside must not become hostage to effete commercialization.
Our villages are our prop on our societal existence. Let that prop not be taken away from us.
