Indians are now looking at Bangladesh differently

The way Bangladesh is crossing one milestone after another with its economic success is gradually changing the outlook of the average Indian. What’s more, it has an impact on India’s internal politics as well.

Several important achievements of Bangladesh in the last two-four months have been well received in India. Earlier, the achievements of Bangladesh which did not get a place in the media of India, are being discussed. And they are now portraying a bright and shining picture of the neighboring country.

A few examples will make this clear.

1) Just before presenting the budget in India in February 2022, Finance Minister Nirmal Sitharaman said that we can learn how to increase exports in certain sectors from Bangladesh. The Economic Survey presented by him commented, Bangladesh has emerged as an important exporter in the international arena. Between 2011 and 2019, the country’s exports grew at a compound annual rate of 8.6 percent, which was 0.9 percent higher than India’s and 0.4 percent higher than the rest of the world.

2) Former Chief Economist of the World Bank and former advisor to the Prime Minister of India, Professor Kaushik Bose tweeted on the morning of May 22. In which the comparative performance of the health and economic sectors of different Asian countries was highlighted. The post, which went viral instantly, showed that Bangladesh achieved 3.8 percent GDP in the last financial year, topping economies like China, India, Malaysia, South Korea. The number of COVID deaths per million population is also only 74 in Bangladesh. India was at the bottom of both tables. Where GDP is negative eight percent. The COVID death rate is also almost three times that of Bangladesh.

 

3) Last week Himanshu Singh wrote a special article in the Calcutta current paper. The title of which was ‘Bangladesh showing the way to self-reliant India’. He described the way Bangladesh handed over 10,000 vials of life-saving Remdesivir to India on May 6 and earlier sent 1,000 modern ventilators as a historic moment. The link of that article has spread like a storm in social media like Facebook and WhatsApp in India.

4) One of the major hubs of India’s garment industry is Noida on the outskirts of Delhi, which the government calls the ‘City of Apparel’. Lalit Thukral, president of the Apparel Export Cluster (NAEC) in Noida, said that their international buyers are turning away from India and turning to Bangladesh due to the pandemic. The organization claims that they have already lost more than twenty percent of their business in Bangladesh (and to some extent in Sri Lanka and Vietnam).

5) The last feather in Bangladesh’s crown has been the dramatic increase in per-capita income. Late last year, the IMF had predicted that Bangladesh would overtake India in terms of per-capita income. And that has come true. On June 1, Bloomberg headlined their news story: ‘South Asia needs to look to the region’s brightest star.’ This star, needless to say, is Bangladesh!

 

In the words of Kalyan Goswami, a political analyst in Delhi, “The narrative about Bangladesh that has been around for so long in this country (India) has undergone a radical change. Indians are increasingly realizing that today’s Bangladesh is an economic ‘success story’.

The earning and employment opportunities in Bangladesh are now very high. As a result, Indians understand that there is no reason for Bangladeshis to come to India unnecessarily, so the BJP’s theory of illegal immigration is no longer able to respond. Goswami’s opinion.

Saikat Sinhara, a well-known economist of Kolkata, clearly says, ‘Whoever deserves credit – and this is the moment for Bangladesh!’

To be clear, the booming economy and growth has forced Indians to take a second look at Bangladesh recently, and all economic indicators point to this trend continuing for some time.