Following the July uprising and political changes in the country, the demand for state reform became louder. The new interim government led by Prof Dr Muhammad Yunus has promised to hold the next general elections after the necessary reforms in various areas of the state.
Six commissions have been formed to carry out these reforms with special importance to the electoral system reform.
The electoral system is one of the most controversial issues in Bangladesh. Various allegations have been raised during the last three general elections and the following local government elections. There were allegations of vote rigging and casting ballots a night before the polling day.
There is also a huge criticism over the role of the election commission organizing the elections.
Badiul Alam Majumder has been working on the electoral system of Bangladesh for a long time. The interim government has appointed him as the head of the commission.
Its members include Dr Tofail Ahmed, a local government and election affairs expert, Jesmin Tuli, a former additional secretary of the Election Commission (EC) Secretariat, Md Abdul Alim, an election expert, Dr Zahed Ur Rahman, a political analyst, Mir Nadia Nivin, an institutional reform and governance process expert, Mohammad Sadek Ferdus, an expert in electronic voting and blockchain and a student representative.
Badiul Alam Majumdar
Dr Majumdar, secretary of Shushashoner Jonno Nagorik (SHUJAN), is leading the group of seven-member commission.
He is an economist, political analyst, local government expert, and development activist.
He has also briefly served on the board of directors of Bangladesh Academy for Rural Development (BARD).
He is currently serving as the country director and global vice president of the US-based charity organisation The Hunger Project (THP). Besides, he is also the president of the National Girl Child Advocacy Forum.
Dr Majumdar was born in 1946 in Comilla. He obtained his Bachelor of Commerce and Master of Commerce degrees from Dhaka University. In 1970, he took his first trip to the US on a Graduate Fellowship for International Understanding, sponsored by the Rotary Foundation, at Claremont Graduate School. He earned a Master of Business Economics (MBE) from Claremont and then went on to earn his Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in Economics from Case Western Reserve University, USA.
Dr Majumdar was a lecturer at Dhaka University from 1969 to 1970. He also taught at Seattle University, Central Washington University and Washington State University. In addition, he worked for NASA and the Saudi Royal Family. He came back to Bangladesh in 1991.
He was a member of the Committee to Strengthen and Revitalize Local Governance, which was set up by the previous caretaker government.
Dr Majumdar has authored several books and published many articles in professional journals. He is also a popular newspaper columnist.
Under Dr Majumdar’s leadership, THP has established programs in all 64 districts of Bangladesh. It has become the largest volunteer organization in the country and is recognized as a leading voice for the rights of girl children.
He is also the author of Innovations, Product Developments, and Technology Transfers: An Empirical Study of Dynamic Competitive Advantage, the Case of Electronic Calculators.
Dr Tofail Ahmed
Dr Ahmed is a local governance expert and the vice chancellor of Britannia University in Comilla.
Born in Fatehpur, Hathazari of Chittagong in 1954, Dr Tofail finished his schooling at Fatehabad High School, and then went to Chittagong College.
He did both his BA and MA at the Department of Politics and Administration of Chittagong University.
After that, he did his MSc in Social Sector Planning and Management at the University of Wales, Swansea, UK and his PhD in Development Studies at the University of Wales.
Tofail Ahmed worked as an assistant teacher (honorary) at Fatehpur High School and also worked for Agani Bank, Chittagong Port Authority, BARD, Chittagong University, Stimulating Household Improvements Resulting in Economic Empowerment (Shiree), the Local Government Commission, UNDP, BIGD-Brac University, Manusher Jonno Foundation (MJF), North South University, and Britannia University, Comilla.
He was a member of the Local Government Commission between November 2008 and February 2009.
He is also a founder member of SHUJAN and a reputed bilingual author of 25 books. He is a known newspaper columnist and television commentator on current political issues.
Jasmine Tuli
Former deputy secretary of the Election Commission and an expert on the electoral system, voter registration, and national identity card, Jasmin Tuli was Bangladesh’s first-ever female returning officer who carried out duties in the 2010 Chittagong City Corporation election.
Jesime Tuli has experience in the country's electoral system and joined the EC as the assistant secretary at the commission in 1984. Tuli also served as the director of the Electoral Training Institute.
Dr Md Abdul Alim
Dr Alim is an election specialist, currently working as the principal director with Democracy International.
He has previously served as the director of the Election Working Group.
Dr Alim has served The Asia Foundation for 12 years. From 2008 to 2018, he worked at UNDP Bangladesh, and in 2006 he became the project manager (Elections) at the same organization.
He finished his studies at Jahangirnagar University and did his PhD in Electoral Governance and Political Parties and MSS (Demography) from Dhaka University.
Dr Zahed Ur Rahman
Dr Rahman is a writer and political analyst and is also an assistant professor at the Department of Development Studies at Bangladesh University of Professionals (BUP).
He is an epistemic enthusiast with demonstrated skills in research on applied economics and development studies. He was a Fulbright Fellow at Illinois State University. He was a staff researcher (Research and Evaluation Division) in BRAC and a co-founder and president of YouthWalk Bangladesh.
Along with this, he worked at the United Nation’s Development Programme, the BRAC Institute of Governance and Development (BIGD), the National Election Observation Council, and the South Asian Youth Society (SAYS).
Dr Zahed completed his studies at the Faculty of Social Sciences at Dhaka University in 2013.
After his name was proposed as a member, Dr Zahed resigned from Nagorik Oikyo as the joint general secretary and also as a general member.
Mir Nadia Nivin
Mir Nivin is an international governance and institutional reform specialist.
She has worked at the UNDP as the head of the Strategic Management Unit and Digital Transformations between 2020 and 2023. She was the head of Governance and Institutional Reforms-UNDP Malaysia in 2018 and 2020 and also the head of Governance-UNDP Afghanistan between 2015 and 2018.
She has also served the United Nations and has experience in strategic planning, change management, risk management, and policymaking.
Mir Nivin finished her master’s in Business Strategy and Public Policy from Harvard University in 2018. She obtained her Master of Science (MSc) in Computer Science from California State University in 2006.
Dr Mohammad Sadek Ferdous
Electronic voting and blockchain expert Dr Ferdous is also a member of the reform commission. He is an associate professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at BRAC University and is a research fellow at the Institute for Security Science and Technology of Imperial College London.
He is also an affiliated research associate at the Imperial College Business School and is currently working on a project involving identity and blockchain technology.
Additionally, he was a research fellow at ERCIM Alain Bensoussan at Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology (FIT) in Germany and an assistant professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Shahajalal University of Science and Technology.
Before that, he worked as a research fellow at the University of Southampton in a Horizon 2020 cloud security project in which he investigated how blockchain technology could be exploited to increase the security in a cloud federation and was part of the team that coined a new blockchain-based service model called FaaS (Federation-as-a-Service).
Prior to that, he worked as a postdoctoral research assistant at the University of Glasgow.
Dr Sadek completed his PhD from the School of Computing Science of the University of Glasgow and is fond of novel mechanisms-based research. His current research interests are Blockchain, Self-sovereign Identity, Identity Management, Security Usability, Trust Management, Petname Systems, Trusted Computing and Privacy Enhancement Technologies.
He is also the principal author of the national blockchain strategy document.
He has co-authored more than 60 research papers published in top journals, conferences, and workshops.
