With about sixty five per cent population residing in the country’s rural areas and facing the dearth of urban facilities prompted the present government to embark on a multidimensional plan to equip villages with urban amenities.
Empowering the rural people to get a taste of urban life and their expectations to get use to modernity the government deftly has dwelt on turning villages into towns as envisaged in the electoral manifesto of Awami League.
Focusing on a multidimensional plan to turn villages into towns to enable rural people get urban facilities and create income-generating opportunities for youths has underpinned the notion of tasking planners, architects and engineers with developing a growth strategy for new towns.
Outlining the plan for turning villages into towns, LGRD and Cooperatives Minister Md Tajul Islam told BSS in an interview, that financial and administrative authorities will be decentralized up to local government bodies. “Cooperatives system in rural areas would be revamped to generate self-employments for youths,” he added.
In view of the present socio-economic context, it aptly seems pertinent that today’s Bangladesh’s survival depends on the well-being of its villages.
The rural Bangladesh has become a focal point for issues of national concern with the impact of high population and development on natural resources, lack of sanitation and its impact on health, water pollution from raw sewage and pesticides runoff and soil loss and desertification due to erosion.
The country’s policymakers are genuinely concerned with the urban areas continuing to absorb explosive population growth while facing a slew of uncertainties regarding health, safety, identity and preservation of cultures.
Tajul Islam said as per the electoral manifesto of Awami League to turn villages into towns, the government has started formulating different plans and boosting up previous ones to strengthen local government bodies to ensure transparency, accountability and raising people’s participation in every development step.
The minister said the Bangladesh Samabaya Bank distributed around Taka 17.43 crore loans among 4125 members of 109 cooperatives associations in different productive sectors, including small businesses, fisheries, rearing of hens, ducks, goats and cows, vegetable farming, tea production, processing of agricultural products and solar and ICT projects.
