Realising the Right to Development in Bangladesh: Progress and Challenges

By signing and ratifying various human rights instruments, the State of Bangladesh has committed itself to pursuing socio-economic policies in a way that would promote its people’s right to development, understood as integrated realisation of the whole range of human rights — including economic, social and cultural rights on the one hand and civil and political rights on the other. But does the development policy of Bangladesh actually conform to the demands of the right to development? This is the question investigated in the present paper. The paper first develops a methodology for answering the question, and then applies it to three specific rights — viz., the right to food, the right to health and the right to education — by drawing upon three case studies on the realisation of these rights in Bangladesh. The investigation finds that while Bangladesh can claim to have made a lot of progress in each of the three areas in terms of standard socio-economic indicators, serious deficiencies remain when judged by the criteria of human rights norms. The major areas of concern relate to the principles of equity, participation and accountability. Although successive governments have paid lip service to all three of these principles, the policies they have pursued in practice have actually undermined them more often than not. Fundamental reorientation is needed in the way the government functions before the development policy of the State of Bangladesh can be said to conform to the demands of the right to development approach.