One of the more less obvious ways that our administration fails us is by not including the disabled into policy-making to any relevant degree.
While the government had passed the Protection and Preservation of the Rights of the Disabled Persons Bill almost a decade ago, it has not resulted in the disabled being treated as anything more than second class citizens even now.
Making Bangladesh a better place for persons with disability is not merely a matter of social justice, fairness, and equity -- though that is certainly part of the story. The fact is, ensuring greater disability rights is also good for the economy, and makes a nation stronger in every way.
We agree that, as a developing nation, Bangladesh still has a raft of larger issues, social and economic, which require our collective attention, issues such as the widening wealth gap giving way to the poor remaining poor and the wealthy becoming even wealthier, not to mention our multitude of infrastructural issues which continue to hamstring any tangible progress towards decentralization.
But it is still possible to achieve those goals without resorting to the exclusion of the disabled, or indeed the numerous other marginalized groups who call this nation home, as far too many in our society still harbour the retrograde mind-set that, somehow, disability makes a person a lesser member of society, or economically unproductive.
This is certainly a false assumption, and the stigma ends up hurting us all in the long run.
As a nation, we need to break away from such damaging stereotypes and work towards building a society that accepts everyone of all stripes. And the first step towards that would be for the administration to include the rights of the disabled into our very policy-making mechanism.