After wasting much valuable time, finance minister AMA Muhith last week inquired about soaring bad loans that rocked several government run banks since 2011 in the backdrop of a series of shady credit scams facilitated by lax monitoring. The finance minister also inquired about raising the lending rates by the banks to depict healthier balance sheets and Bangladesh Bank’s silence over the issue. In a directive issued last week, the finance minister asked the bank and financial institution division to let him know about the picture. Cri...

Thomas Hood’s 1843 poem Song of the Shirt is the title of ‘labour chronicler’ Jeremy Seabrook’s latest book. Hood’s poem, a scathing indictment of industrial Britain, was written in memory of Mrs. Biddell, a widowed seamstress caught in a debt trap, compelled to pawn the clothes she made in order to feed her malnourished child. Seabrook picks the weft thread of Hood’s poem and weaves a grim, unforgiving human tapestry of Bangladesh’s garment industry. His book is a bleak anthem to a country on the throes of an inhuman globalisation process, its poor subjected to never-ending penitential labour.