To celebrate the golden jubilee of the independence of Bangladesh, the Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD) is organizing a virtual international conference, co-sponsored by the South Asia Program of Cornell University, which will explore the country’s developments in different sectors—politics, economy, society and culture. A number of national and international webinars have already been organized this year on Bangladesh. They have portrayed the remarkable story of Bangladesh’s development—how it has succeeded in rebuilding a war-ravaged economy and society and made steady progress in key indicators of human development and economic growth.

However, the story of Bangladesh’s progress is generally being told from a quantitative perspective, for example, the upward or downward trends in life expectancy, mortality, fertility, school enrolment, labor force participation, poverty reduction, export earnings, foreign exchange reserve, GDP, etc. The numbers do indicate significant gains in social and economic development, but they do not adequately capture the depth of the changes that have taken place in peoples’ lives in the economy, politics, society and culture of Bangladesh.

The CPD conference aims to deepen our understanding of Bangladesh’s multifaceted development over the last fifty years. The event will draw upon specially commissioned papers, covering a broad spectrum of issues addressing the qualitative dimensions of development and change as well as explore the processes which have produced these changes. The proceedings of the conference are expected to be published.