Why blow $248 million on a flashy satellite like Bangabandhu-1 when Bangladesh can’t even keep its people from drowning in poverty and trash?
Space ambitions are glamorous, sure, but let’s get real: prioritize feeding the masses first. Poverty’s at 28% in 2025, extreme poverty 9.35%, and progress has basically stalled since 2016.
Here’s what they should’ve tackled instead:
- Clean up the filth: Dhaka chokes on 6,500 tonnes of waste daily — more than half unmanaged, poisoning air, water, and lives like a dystopian nightmare
- Boost life expectancy past a mediocre 72.3 years: fix collapsing hospitals, doctor shortages, and those sanity-melting heat waves
- Overhaul education: only 19% of toddlers get early learning, the rest trapped in rote-memorization hell — because who needs critical thinkers?
- Build basic water & sanitation: just 42.6% have safely managed drinking water, millions still lack proper toilets
- End the blackout farce: “near-universal” access is a joke when outages remain daily life
- Patch death-trap roads: pedestrians = 34% of fatalities thanks to garbage infrastructure
- Erect proper flood barriers before monsoons and cyclones wreck millions every year in this climate hotspot
- Spark real jobs: 4.7% unemployment stalled poverty reduction = recipe for unrest
- Provide decent housing instead of letting millions rot in slums without water or power
That satellite gives TV signals and a sprinkle of broadband to remote areas — cute. You can’t eat national pride or pay rent with prestige.
Earthly fixes over orbiting ego trips.
Get your head out of the clouds, Bangladesh.
#Bangladesh #PrioritiesFirst #DevelopmentCrisis