January 2018 — Page 2 of 2 — LIRNEasia


Mustafa Jabbar, the newly appointed minister for the Ministry of Posts, Telecommunications and Information Technology, cannot waste much time on receiving bouquets and greetings. Prime minister Sheikh Hasina has offloaded this portfolio on him after unceremoniously ejecting her veteran comrade in October 2014. Since then Hasina had been minding this ministry besides discharging her prime ministerial duties. She depended on two junior ministers – Zunaid Ahmed Palak for Information Technology and Tarana Halim for Posts and Telecommunications – to run the show. It had been a poor show and Jabbar must fix it.
When we discovered that Nepal had only spent 2.6 percent of the universal-service funds it had collected since 1997, we were shocked. No government could do worse, we thought. But we were wrong. The Bangladesh government’s disbursement rate is much easier to calculate.
For more than a year, we at LIRNEasia have been working on the analysis of images. The NYT story on Stanford researchers working on Google Street View describes the potential well. For computers, as for humans, reading and observation are two distinct ways to understand the world, Mr. Lieberman Aiden said. In that sense, he said, “computers don’t have one hand tied behind their backs anymore.
Two years ago, I wrote this in my year-end message to the LIRNEasia team: The first thing that comes to mind is the book club. Not something that LIRNEasia management initiated, but something that spontaneously emerged. Having learned more from the books that I hid under my desk in school than from formal education, I strongly believe the value of reading. And I happen to also believe that fiction and poetry are perhaps the best vehicles for communicating the most abstract of truths. The business gurus and even the foundations are now going on about the power of stories, another thing LIRNEasia was ahead of the curve on.