It is good news that we have done better than Pakistan and Nepal in areas like average life expectancy, female literacy and fertility rate. Obviously, these areas are going to have an impact on national development. But adult education remains a sore point as Bangladesh lags behind all other countries in this region.

The biggest challenge before the nation, however, is to reduce unemployment which has gone up despite the economic reforms carried out over the last decade. Joblessness increased by 3.3 percent a year throughout the nineties and has had a crippling effect on the economy. The economists have gone to the extent of saying that economic reforms even produced negative results in some cases as the country had to go by the dictates of the donor agencies. Maladies like reforms in wrong order, gender inequity, and absence of effective programmes for generating income have also been identified.

The large unskilled labour force has been marked as the main under-achiever. The report has found that 8.4 percent of the male labour force remains under-employed while this is true about a staggering 71.2 percent of the female workers. The economists have pointed out that a large chunk of the workforce is engaged in low productivity employment. They have also stressed the need for much greater commitment to employment generation. The income gap between the rich and the poor has widened further, which is a symptom of lopsided growth.

However, the success achieved by our farmers, who have doubled rice production in the last two decades, is a noteworthy development.

Now, the decision-makers have to take note of the failures, and the remedies suggested to overcome them, in order to attain the human development goals in all the sectors.