How FDI minded are we?

It appears that the new Government is also very sincere in this matter with visible efforts.

Going by the sound-bytes so far, it seems the Government is determined to carry out the painful reforms that are essential to make way for large volume of FDI.

The Bangladesh Investment Summit 2025 held in April, 2025 is a good starting point.

In that Summit, our Executive Chairman for Bangladesh Investment Development Authority (BIDA) , Ashik Chowdhury, made a pitch before the foreign investors to make a case for Bangladesh in eloquent and well articulate English.

Rather than appreciating the challenges and discussing way out for bringing FDI in a meaningful manner, our public intellectuals took to attacking Mr. Ashik by taunting him with poor FDI figures following his presentation.

This only begs the question, whether the people who are shaping our mind, are shaping or scrambling our mind.

Moving on, recently, Bangladesh Biman placed an order for 14 aircrafts from Boeing at a cost of $3.7Bn.

Again, the same set of public intellectuals were up in arms to voice their grave concerns over this large order.

Many of them termed it as an attempt to sell out the country.

But while raising concerns felt justified, we never discussed how the foreign carriers keep on adding the number of flights to and from Dhaka, while Biman struggles to operate its small fleet of aircraft profitably.