Banner Advertise

Thursday, October 1, 2009

[chottala.com] ‘microlending’ doesn’t actually do much to fight poverty - Boston Globe Article



Small change

Billions of dollars and a Nobel Prize later, it looks like 'microlending' doesn't actually do much to fight poverty

By Drake Bennett
Globe Staff / September 20, 2009

In the world of international aid, microcredit is a rock star. The practice of giving very poor people very small loans to start very small businesses has been hailed as one of the very few unambiguous success stories in the long, frustrating fight against Third World poverty. The pioneer of the practice, Bangladesh's Grameen Bank, has disbursed more than $8 billion in unsecured loans, usually in amounts under $100, to people traditional banks ignore. Along with a 98 percent repayment rate, Grameen has accrued an inspiring collection of stories about its overwhelmingly female borrowers, whose microloans allowed them to start up an embroidery or pottery business, or a snack cart or a stand selling cell phone cards, and through such petty entrepreneurship lift themselves out of poverty. "Small Loans, Big Gains," a 2002 Globe editorial on microcredit was titled.

Discuss
COMMENTS (7)

Microlending institutions have sprung up all over the developing world, from India to Bolivia to Serbia; by one estimate, over 150 million people worldwide have taken out a microloan. Government aid groups and NGOs have rushed to fund them, and so have Wall Street banks and hedge funds, enticed by the promise of an anti-poverty program that can do so much while paying for itself - and even turning a nice profit. Grameen Bank and its founder, Mohammad Yunus, were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006, and Yunus is fond of saying that, thanks to microcredit, his grandchildren will have to go to museums to know what poverty looks like.

But two new research papers suggest that microcredit is not nearly the powerful tool it has been made out to be. The papers, by leading development economists affiliated with MIT's Jameel Poverty Action Lab, have not yet been published, but they are already being called the most thorough, careful studies yet done on the topic. What they find is that, by most measures, microcredit does not offer a way out of poverty. It helps a few of the more entrepreneurial poor to start up businesses, and at the margins it may boost the profits of existing microenterprises, but that doesn't translate into gains for the borrowers, as measured by indicators like income, spending, health, or education. In fact, most microcredit clients actually spend their borrowed money not on a business, but on household expenses, on paying off other debts or on a relatively big-ticket item like a TV or a daughter's wedding. And while microcredit champions point to microloans as a tool for empowering women, the studies see no impact on gender roles, and find evidence that if any one group benefits more, it's male entrepreneurs with existing businesses.

"Microcredit is not a transformational panacea that is going to lift people out of poverty," says Dean Karlan, an economics professor at Yale and a co-author of one of the studies. "There might be little pockets here and there of people who are made better off, but the average effect is weak, if not nonexistent."

In other words, Karlan and others argue, there's a place for microcredit in the campaign to help the world's poor, it's just not a very big one. And in the global anti-poverty fight - where aid budgets and public attention are both limited, and the potential stakes measured in the trajectories of millions of lives - it's vitally important to know what actually works, and what is simply hype. That's all the more true with microcredit, where the interest rates are usually far higher than what we're accustomed to in the developed world, and where there's always the risk that poor borrowers, just like wealthier ones, may end up piling up debts they can't repay.

Microcredit's defenders say the new findings, while suggestive, aren't enough to prove anything. Some argue that they actually show that microcredit works, in a qualified way, providing a cheaper alternative to the village moneylender and his ruinous interest rates. Microcredit's more dramatic effects, they suggest, may take longer to appear than the 1½-to-2-year windows the researchers looked at.

Underlying all of this is a debate over the role and the importance of the micro-entrepreneur. Part of the appeal of microcredit lies in its suggestion that the world's slums are populated not by helpless victims of global forces, but eager entrepreneurs lacking only a $30 loan to start a business and pull themselves out of poverty. The new research underlines the fact that, inspiring as that story may be, it misrepresents how both individuals and nations climb the economic ladder. Developing nations already have far more petty entrepreneurs than wealthy countries do, mostly because people there have little choice but to start their own business if they want to make any money. What these countries don't have enough of are the kinds of steady jobs that more reliably raise incomes, and the sort of enterprises, often quite large, that provide them. Truly addressing the poverty of the developing world may require that we think macro rather than micro.

In 1976, Muhammad Yunus was an American-trained economics professor at Bangladesh's University of Chittagong. A brutal famine two years earlier had made him vividly aware of the precarious lives of the very poor, and he had begun to spend much of his time in Jobra, a village that abutted the university. It was there, he recounts in his autobiography, that he met a woman named Sufiya Begum, a young mother of three who made bamboo stools by hand. Begum was too poor to afford the 5 takas (about 22 cents) per stool that her bamboo cost, so she had to borrow the money from merchants. As part of the deal, she then had to sell the merchants her stools, and they set their prices so that she only cleared two cents a stool.

All she needed to break out of that pernicious cycle, Yunus realized, was 22 cents. Then she could buy her own bamboo and sell her stools on the retail market, using what she earned to buy more bamboo and pocketing the profits. So Yunus decided to lend it to her himself. Working with a student, he drew up a list of 42 Jobra villagers in situations like Begum's and lent them, out of his own pocket, the money it took to pay off their debts. All in all it came to $27.

It was out of this first experiment that Grameen Bank was born; last month the bank disbursed just under $97 million worth of loans to borrowers all over Bangladesh. Yet, despite the explosive growth, there's been little rigorous research on the efficacy of microcredit.

This is not necessarily unusual for development and antipoverty interventions. Such research can be very difficult to do. When the target is something as complex as poverty, even at the level of a small village cause and effect can be maddeningly elusive.

And once an aid organization or philanthropically minded corporation, won over by powerful success stories, commits to an antipoverty tool, whether it's microcredit or bed nets or building rural schools, they tend to lose interest in funding research that could suggest that it doesn't work.

Ironically, the very speed with which microcredit has spread has made it hard to do the sort of comparisons that would most clearly measure its impact: in Bangladesh today it's impossible to find a community where people don't already have access to microcredit.

The new microcredit studies set out to address these challenges. At least one author of each of the papers is affiliated with MIT's Poverty Action Lab, a research center that brings together economists with a determinedly experimental bent. In particular, its researchers all share a belief in randomized controlled trials - the same sort of test that new drugs have to undergo - as a tool for evaluating poverty alleviation measures.

Karlan and his co-author, Jonathan Zinman, an associate economics professor at Dartmouth, looked at a bank in the Philippines that offered microloans. They created their controlled experiment by altering the algorithm the bank used to evaluate creditworthiness so that some borderline applicants were randomly denied loans while other otherwise identical applicants had loans approved. The researchers then followed up with the borrowers and nonborrowers to see what difference the loan had made.

The answer was not much. Neither household income nor spending rose for those who got microloans. And borrowers who did put the money into their businesses - instead of using it, as many did, for household expenses - actually shrank rather than grew their businesses. Karlan and Zinman suggest that this might be because the business owners were taking advantage of the loan to fire unproductive workers to whom they owed financial favors, and those firings seemed to explain the very small gains in profit Karlan and Zinman found. In addition, the gains accrued only to male entrepreneurs, not the women usually targeted by microcredit programs.

The second study, co-authored by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, economics professors at MIT, along with Rachel Glennerster, executive director of the Poverty Action Lab, and an MIT economics doctoral student named Cynthia Kinnan, found a slightly larger impact, though a selective one. Working with a microcredit bank in India that was looking to expand in the city of Hyderabad, the researchers did find some small positive effects. Borrowers who already had a business did see some increase in profit. Households without businesses that the researchers judged more predisposed to start one were found to cut back on spending, suggesting they were saving to augment their loan for a capital business expense like a pushcart or a sewing machine. The researchers also found small but encouraging shifts in household spending across the board, with less money spent on "temptation goods" like alcohol, tobacco, and gambling.

Still, overall household spending - a key indicator of financial well-being - stayed about the same. And the researchers found no effect on children's health or education levels, and the women in the borrower homes were no more likely to play a role in household decisions than those in the control group.

To Duflo, this only seems disappointing because expectations for microcredit are so high.

"I don't see this as a negative finding," she says. When asked why she thinks microcredit didn't boost health and education outcomes, she says, "I would really ask the question, 'Why did we expect all these things to happen?' If you give people access to a financial instrument, it's like any other instrument. It's useful, but it's not like the miracle drug to end poverty."

For microcredit's defenders, evidence like this is, at best, an incomplete portrait. In part that's because of the relatively short time horizon of the studies.

"Certainly if people expected to see increasing incomes right away, in 12 months, that might be too much to expect," says Nachiket Mor, an economist and president of India's ICICI Foundation for Inclusive Growth.

Other microcredit proponents argue that the fact that microcredit has proliferated as fast as it has, with new clients signing on in droves and old ones coming back repeatedly, means it must be providing a reliable benefit to borrowers, if only by allowing them to pay off higher-interest moneylender loans.

"The fact that [microcredit] has survived commercially, I take that more seriously than any other piece of evidence," says Tyler Cowen, an economics professor at George Mason University who has studied the topic.

Even among some of microcredit's more passionate proponents, however, there has been a ratcheting down of the rhetoric in recent years. What microcredit may do, they argue, is not transform lives, but simply ameliorate them, giving poor people a more affordable source for credit, and one that, unlike some moneylenders, will not resort to physical violence if someone can't repay.

"The picture that emerges is not of people climbing out of poverty through microenterprise, but people doing what they need to to get by," says David Roodman, a microcredit expert at the Center for Global Development.

Nonetheless, the microcredit narrative of entrepreneurship and self-advancement is a stirring one, and still tends to dominate the image microcredit institutions present to the world.

Karlan sees the romance of this ideology standing in the way of measures that might more directly aid poor households. In many situations, he argues, the most helpful thing for poor households may not be a loan - especially since microloan interest rates can run from 30 up to 100 percent - but making it easier for them to save, or allowing them to buy some form of formal insurance policy against financial shocks. Research has shown that even people making $2 a day can put some money aside, and in many poor neighborhoods people don't save as much as they might simply because there's no trustworthy place to put their savings.

And if there are interventions that can lift whole neighborhoods - and, ultimately, whole nations - out of poverty, they will probably have to be much broader in scope. Part of the appeal of microcredit is that it avoids the frustrations of anti-poverty campaigns that seek to catalyze economic growth at a large scale. But it's a basic tenet of economics that scale has its advantages. Forty workers at a textile plant are going to be much more productive than 40 microentrepreneur weavers each working by themselves.

Partly in response to these concerns, Grameen itself has begun to offer a line of loans of up to $10,000 for what might be called mini- rather than microenterprises. And in a more marked shift, a few NGOs have begun to focus on the previously neglected sector of medium-sized businesses in the developing world, looking not just at loans, but buying equity stakes in the companies to provide them with interest-free money. They're bigger investments, and in the end they may have far bigger returns.

Drake Bennett is the staff writer for Ideas. E-mail drbennett@globe.com .

Also Read ENA report on this article (Bangla):

http://www.khabor.com/news/prabash/10/prabasher_news_10012009_0000010.htm

 

 

 

 

 



__._,_.___


[* Moderator's Note - CHOTTALA is a non-profit, non-religious, non-political and non-discriminatory organization.

* Disclaimer: Any posting to the CHOTTALA are the opinion of the author. Authors of the messages to the CHOTTALA are responsible for the accuracy of their information and the conformance of their material with applicable copyright and other laws. Many people will read your post, and it will be archived for a very long time. The act of posting to the CHOTTALA indicates the subscriber's agreement to accept the adjudications of the moderator]




Your email settings: Individual Email|Traditional
Change settings via the Web (Yahoo! ID required)
Change settings via email: Switch delivery to Daily Digest | Switch to Fully Featured
Visit Your Group | Yahoo! Groups Terms of Use | Unsubscribe

__,_._,___

[chottala.com] 97 killed in "shootouts" or in custody in 9 months: Odhikar



97 killed in "shootouts" or in custody in 9 months: Odhikar
 
Fri, Oct 2nd, 2009 12:44 am BdST
Dhaka, Oct 1 (bdnews24.com)--A total of 97 people died in "shootouts" and in custody of law-enforcing agencies this year, said independent human-rights watchdog Odhikar.

In a press statement, Odhikar said on Thursday that it tallied the deaths until Sep 30 from Jan 1 this year.

It said 28 people were killed by elite force Rapid Action Battalion, 41 were killed by the police, while another 21 were killed in joint operations by RAB and police.

It said military, Ansar, jail police and forest guards are responsible for deaths of seven people.

Another 20 people died in so-called safe custody, said Odhikar.

The watchdog also said that a large number of journalists and media workers were harassed, tortured during this period while some faced cases.

It said two journalists were reportedly killed, 52 were injured, 48 were threatened and 14 were attacked.

Apart from that one journalist was kidnapped, 22 were assaulted and 13 were victim of false cases, the report said.

It also said that Indian border force BSF continued to violate human rights by attacking innocent people along the border with Bangladesh.

The BSF reportedly killed 82 Bangladeshis over last nine months.

Another 59 Bangladeshis were injured in BSF firing while 78 were kidnapped, said the report.

Ninety-two Bangladeshis were missing while 11 Bangla-speaking Indians have been pushed into Bangladesh by the BSF, it said.

Over last nine months, 338 women and children were reportedly raped.

Among the cases 158 were adult and the rest were children.

Fifty women and 22 children were killed after rape.

Of them, 68 women and 51 children were gang raped, it said.

Odhikar regularly prepares the human rights report mainly on the basis of information gleaned from newspapers.
 
Related:
 
 

One more extremist killed in Kushtia

Bangladesh News 24 hours - ‎Sep 25, 2009‎
Human-rights organisation 'Odhikar' said 19 people were killed in the country in August in so-called 'crossfire, encounter or gunfight', of whom 10 were ...
 
 

 


__._,_.___


[* Moderator�s Note - CHOTTALA is a non-profit, non-religious, non-political and non-discriminatory organization.

* Disclaimer: Any posting to the CHOTTALA are the opinion of the author. Authors of the messages to the CHOTTALA are responsible for the accuracy of their information and the conformance of their material with applicable copyright and other laws. Many people will read your post, and it will be archived for a very long time. The act of posting to the CHOTTALA indicates the subscriber's agreement to accept the adjudications of the moderator]




Your email settings: Individual Email|Traditional
Change settings via the Web (Yahoo! ID required)
Change settings via email: Switch delivery to Daily Digest | Switch to Fully Featured
Visit Your Group | Yahoo! Groups Terms of Use | Unsubscribe

__,_._,___

[chottala.com] A victim of U.S. torture : Free Aafia Siddiqui By Sara Flounders New York



Dear All,

For years together we are seeing in this chottala group about a Pakistani lady Dr. Aafia Siddiqui getting a big coverage about her life history and torture in American detention. There are so many in American detentions up till now but why this lady is getting some special attention and sympathy. What interest our Bangladesh have about this Pakistani lady as she is getting so much big, time killing coverage in our chottala group regularly?
Dowllah.

 
 
 
 
Syed Aslam (Syed.Aslam3@gmail.com) wrote:
A victim of U.S. torture

Free Aafia Siddiqui

By Sara Flounders
New York
Published Sep 13, 2009 10:13 PM
Now that the documents recording the systematic torture of thousands of prisoners in secret U.S. prisons have been released to the world media in U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder's Aug. 24 report, the secret documents on the imprisonment and torture of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui must also be released.
Days before Siddiqui, a woman weighing less than 90 pounds, was again forcibly brought into United States District Court in Manhattan on contradictory charges of trying to murder FBI agents in Afghanistan, these documents of what the FBI and CIA are really doing in Afghanistan and in secret prisons around the world were referenced in major news stories for all to read.
Siddiqui has been held in secret detention since she was kidnapped in Pakistan at the age of 30. The now 36-year-old, U.S.-educated, Pakistani neuroscientist continues in court to say that she has been tortured. She has refused to accept visits even from appointed defense lawyers because the brutal and humiliating strip searches that she is subjected to are so personally and culturally degrading and excruciatingly painful.
Siddiqui has wounds and scars from her sternum to her lower abdomen after being shot by U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. Her charges of being tortured for years are hardly groundless. These acts are documented again and again on every page of the newly-released documents.
Tens of thousands of pages confirm in the most graphic details that CIA interrogators threatened to kill the children of detainees; threatened sexual assaults; threatened bound prisoners with guns and an electric drill; used water boarding against one prisoner 183 times; used shocking into unconsciousness, brutal strip searches, mock executions, confinement in a tiny box and continued slamming of the head.
Holder announced on Aug. 29 the appointment of a special federal prosecutor to investigate the interrogation practices of the CIA. These new documents represent the largest release of information about the Bush administration's once-secret system of capturing terrorism suspects and interrogating them in undisclosed locations around the world.
An ACLU lawsuit compelled the release of the CIA's own 2004 Inspector General's internal report on stomach-turning interrogations. These documents of "enhanced interrogation" tactics were heavily 'redacted' or censored with whole pages blocked out for "security reasons."
This 2004 report shows that the CIA kept detailed observational records on thousands of prisoners and the impact of their torture techniques on the human psyche. They made systematic measurements of the prisoners' reactions to torture. From the censured documents it is clear that medical doctors and psychologists betrayed their professions by monitoring calibrated, incremental increases of torture to bring about excruciating pain, terror, humiliation and shame. The documents make it clear that all tortures were designed to create a systematic emotional and psychological breakdown in the interrogated prisoners.
Held in secret prisons
Aafia Siddiqui is a graduate of  the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and holds a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Brandeis University. She is a deeply devout Muslim, who had been supportive of Muslim charities in Boston. On March 30, 2003, during a trip home to Karachi to visit her mother, she was kidnapped and "disappeared," along with her three children.
Human rights organizations had long demanded that U.S. and Pakistani intelligence agencies account for her disappearance. Human Rights Watch, a year before she was shot and flown to the U.S., considered her among those held at a "CIA black site"—a secret prison.
U.S. officials denied any knowledge of her for five years. But as far back as April 2003, the Press Trust of India reported that she had been arrested in Karachi and was being questioned by the FBI. U.S. intelligence sources at that time confirmed that Siddiqui was "essentially in the hands of the FBI now."
Siddiqui's family retained U.S. attorney Elaine Whitfield Sharp of Massachusetts to try to discover her location and to serve as their spokeswoman to the media. She had been filing cases seeking information in U.S. courts ever since Siddiqui's disappearance.
Millions of people in Pakistan and throughout the Muslim world, along with many human rights groups, always believed that the U.S. government forces and the Inter Services Intelligence of Pakistan had captured and tortured her and were holding her in secret prisons in Pakistan or Afghanistan. Many believe that she was the prisoner described as the Grey Lady of Bagram Prison at the U.S. Air Base in Afghanistan. Prisoners released from secret detention at Bagram described hearing the continuing howls of a woman prisoner being repeatedly raped and tortured. According to The Daily Times of Pakistan, "The cries of this helpless woman echoed with such torment in the jail that it prompted prisoners to go on hunger strike." (July 7, 2008)
A growing number of media in the region began reporting that Siddiqui had been in Bagram for the last five years, and calls for her release were escalating.
Contradictory charges
On Aug. 4, 2008, the U.S. government suddenly announced that Siddiqui had been arrested on July 17 and charged with attempted murder and assault of U.S. officers and employees. She was then flown to the U.S. in the custody of FBI agents.
Attorney Sharp told the New York Times, "We believe Aafia has been in U.S. custody ever since she disappeared." (Aug. 5, 2008)
In another interview with Action in Solidarity with Asia and the Pacific, she said: "We do know she was at Bagram for a long time. According to my client she was there for years and she was held in American custody; her treatment was horrendous." (www.asia-pacific-action.org, Aug. 7)
A series of contrary reports claimed that U.S. soldiers, trying to take her from Afghan police who had arrested her in Ghazni, a city in central Afghanistan, had shot her after she managed to grab an M-4 rifle and shoot at two FBI agents. Neither agent was wounded.
How this 90-pound prisoner surrounded by both U.S. soldiers and Afghan police accomplished this was never explained. Other reports were that she was shot in the abdomen because U.S. soldiers feared she was a suicide bomber.
Neither the Afghan nor U.S. reports of how, when or even where Siddiqui was captured correspond with each other. The U.S. version claims she had maps of New York City targets in her handbag. Afghan officials claim the maps were of Afghan targets. What is known is that Siddiqui has been horribly brutalized and has been held in total isolation now for a year in U.S. prisons with terrible, life-threatening injuries.
The case has generated outrage all over the Muslim world. Dr. Siddiqui has become a symbol of the thousands of those who have "disappeared" and been tortured by expanding U.S. wars in the region.
Dr. Siddiqui has been brought into court in a wheelchair. This writer heard her tell the court again on Sept. 3, in her weak voice that she was tortured. She has been kept in extreme isolation and forced to listen to threats on the lives of her children. She was shown a picture of her son lying in a pool of his own blood.
Siddiqui's 12-year-old son has recently been released to her family. Her 11-year-old daughter is still unaccounted for. It is believed that her youngest, an infant at the time of Siddiqui's disappearance, died in custody.
Court hearings on Siddiqui's sanity ruled that she was fit to stand trial, although she was found to be delusional and depressed. U.S. attorney William Ruskin stated to the court that information about where she was for five years is "not relevant to these proceedings."
Pakistan's parliament unanimously passed a resolution that demanded immediate information on the whereabouts of Siddiqui's three children and demanded her immediate repatriation to Pakistan. A parliamentary delegation came to visit her. Facing growing mass outrage in Pakistan, the government allocated $2 million for U.S. lawyers to aid in her defense.
At a Sept. 3 court appearance, Siddiqui's trial date was set for Nov. 2. The courtroom was full of Pakistani and other Muslim supporters. Activists from the Pakistan USA Freedom Forum and other organizations have mobilized on days when Dr. Siddiqui is brought into court.
In addition to Elaine Sharp, the lawyer hired by the family, the lawyers hired by the Pakistani government are Linda Moreno and Charles Swift. Another lawyer, Chad Hadgar, will assist the team, as will the court-appointed defense attorney, Dawn Cardi. Moreno was a lawyer for Dr. Sami al-Arian, a Palestinian unjustly imprisoned in the U.S.
The legal team was appointed over Siddiqui's rejection of all lawyers. Linda Moreno said in a Sept. 3 press briefing that she felt that the legal team would have to earn Dr. Siddiqui's trust because: "After what she has been through she has no trust for the whole system. What has been done to Dr. Siddiqui is disgusting, degrading and humiliating. This is a Guantánamo case outside of Guantánamo. ... Dr. Siddiqui has been treated worse than the detainees at Guantánamo. ... We are confident that the evidence in this case will show that Dr. Siddiqui harmed no one. To the contrary, this 90-pound mother of three was shot and wounded herself, the alleged circumstances of which are not supported by evidence. Dr. Siddiqui harmed no one. She is innocent of these charges."
This is a case that must be taken up in full solidarity by the entire progressive movement, including the women's movement, the movement for immigrant rights and the broad movement against U.S. racism and war.
The demand for Siddiqui's freedom must be combined with the demand for the release of all the secret documents on Siddiqui's long imprisonment. The 130,000 pages of documents released by Holder confirm that the most detailed records were kept, with Nazi-like meticulousness, on the wrenching torture and racist abuse of countless prisoners held in U.S. secret prisons.
The case of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui exposes the whole sordid torturous role of the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan and the widening war in Pakistan. Support for her freedom and return to her family in Pakistan is a basic demand for human rights and justice for a woman who has been horrendously abused.
A rally to support Siddiqui is planned for Nov. 2 in front of U.S. District Court, 500 Pearl Street in Manhattan.


Articles copyright 1995-2009 Workers World. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.

Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email:
ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Support independent news http://www.workers.org/orders/donate.php

Judge agrees to lawyers' team for Aafia

DAWN.com - ‎Sep 2, 2009‎
By Our Correspondent NEW YORK: A US judge on Wednesday agreed to accept a five-member lawyers' team to defend Pakistani neuroscientist Aafia Siddiqui ...

Aafia's lawyers to visit Pakistan

DAWN.com - Masood Haider - ‎Sep 5, 2009‎
NEW YORK: Two of the three new lawyers engaged by Pakistani government to defend Dr Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani neuroscientist accused of ...
 


[* Moderator�s Note - CHOTTALA is a non-profit, non-religious, non-political and non-discriminatory organization.

* Disclaimer: Any posting to the CHOTTALA are the opinion of the author. Authors of the messages to the CHOTTALA are responsible for the accuracy of their information and the conformance of their material with applicable copyright and other laws. Many people will read your post, and it will be archived for a very long time. The act of posting to the CHOTTALA indicates the subscriber's agreement to accept the adjudications of the moderator]
Recent Activity
Visit Your Group
Give Back
Yahoo! for Good

Get inspired

by a good cause.

Y! Toolbar
Get it Free!

easy 1-click access

to your groups.

Yahoo! Groups
Start a group

in 3 easy steps.

Connect with others.

.


We are your photos. Share us now with Windows Live Photos.

Windows Live helps you keep up with all your friends, in one place.

__._,_.___


[* Moderator�s Note - CHOTTALA is a non-profit, non-religious, non-political and non-discriminatory organization.

* Disclaimer: Any posting to the CHOTTALA are the opinion of the author. Authors of the messages to the CHOTTALA are responsible for the accuracy of their information and the conformance of their material with applicable copyright and other laws. Many people will read your post, and it will be archived for a very long time. The act of posting to the CHOTTALA indicates the subscriber's agreement to accept the adjudications of the moderator]




Your email settings: Individual Email|Traditional
Change settings via the Web (Yahoo! ID required)
Change settings via email: Switch delivery to Daily Digest | Switch to Fully Featured
Visit Your Group | Yahoo! Groups Terms of Use | Unsubscribe

__,_._,___

[bdlug] বাগেরহাট হবে ডিজিটাল : উইকিপিডিয়ার তথ্য সমৃদ্ধি ও ছবি সংগ্রহ

জ্ঞান উৎসবের ওয়েবসাইটে স্বাগত

"জ্ঞান বিজ্ঞানে বাগেরহাট
এক্কেবারে ফিটফাট
উন্নয়নের ধরবে হাল
হবেই হবে ডিজিটাল।"

তৃণমূল পর্যায়ে ডিজিটাল প্রযুক্তিকে ছড়িয়ে দেওয়ার মাধ্যমে একটি জ্ঞানভিত্তিক
সমাজ তৈরির জন্য নানামূখী উদ্যোগের অংশ হিসেবে 'জ্ঞান উৎসব২০০৯: বাগেরহাট হবে
ডিজিটাল' উৎসবের ওয়েবসাইটে স্বাগত। এই আয়োজনের উদ্যোগ নিয়েছে আমাদের গ্রাম -
উন্নয়নের জন্য তথ্য প্রযুক্তি প্রকল্প। বাগেরহাট জেলা প্রশাসনের সার্বিক
সহযোগিতায় দুইদিনব্যাপী আয়োজনের সহ-আয়োজক বাংলাদেশ ওপেন সোর্স নেটওয়ার্ক।

অন্যান্য অনুষ্ঠানের পাশাপাশি এখানে ইন্টারনেটের মুক্ত জ্ঞানভান্ডার
উইকিপিডিয়াতে বাগেরহাট সংক্রান্ত তথ্সমূহ হালনাগাদ করার কর্মশালা হবে, হবে
মুক্ত ফটো প্রতিযোগিতা।

আপনাদের সবাইকে স্বাগতম।

http://www.digitalbagerhat.org/
|=============|
Regards,
Abu Mohammad Omar Shehab Uddin Ayub
(আবু মোহাম্মদ ওমর শেহাবউদ্দীন আইয়ুব)
Senior Software Engineer, Nilavo Technologies, Banani, Dhaka
Bangladesh Open Source Network, Dhaka
2000 batch, Dept. of CSE, SUST
Sent from Dhaka, Bangladesh


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

------------------------------------

To unsubscribe send a blank mail to:
bdlug-unsubscribe@egroups.comYahoo! Groups Links

<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/bdlug/

<*> Your email settings:
Individual Email | Traditional

<*> To change settings online go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/bdlug/join
(Yahoo! ID required)

<*> To change settings via email:
mailto:bdlug-digest@yahoogroups.com
mailto:bdlug-fullfeatured@yahoogroups.com

<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
bdlug-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com

<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/