Mashiur Rahman Selim, Cumilla South

Government and non-government initiatives aimed at poverty alleviation and youth welfare across the greater Laksam region—encompassing Laksam and Lalmai upazilas in southern Cumilla—have run into serious operational hurdles due to multi-faceted crises, systemic irregularities, and a persistent lack of industrialization, leaving thousands of young people unemployed.

Local sources report that youth unemployment, food security, and malnutrition have evolved into critical concerns for the region. While job creation remains the primary weapon against poverty, the implementation pace of employment generation programs in these upazilas has been notably sluggish. Over the past 15 years under the previous administration, despite broader national progress, service sectors in the region suffered heavily due to corruption, irregularities, and a widespread lack of accountability.

Human development sectors—including education, healthcare, nutrition, safe drinking water, sanitation, energy, infrastructure, gender equality, women's empowerment, local government structural development, environmental balance, unplanned construction, illegal land grabbing, and information technology—have severely underperformed. Locals complain that responsible authorities have largely neglected their duties, depriving residents of basic civic services.

Traders and local stakeholders noted that business instability has plagued the greater Laksam region for nearly two decades, fueled by turbulent political interference. The absence of localized job creation has caused unemployment and poverty to escalate daily. Despite having ideal prerequisites for investment and trade expansion—such as a free-market economy, an investment-friendly environment, skilled manpower, and robust commercial access—the region suffers from a profound scarcity of both public and local entrepreneurial investment due to a lack of genuine institutional interest.

Local cooperatives pointed out that while some champions of a "Digital Bangladesh" initiative highlight poverty alleviation and youth welfare, current information technology indicators paint a discouraging picture. Bangladesh ranks 26th globally on the IT index with a score of 1.01, far below South Asia's regional average of 4.28. In contrast, countries like China have achieved stellar results in poverty reduction and youth employment alongside a strong IT index score of 9.6, a milestone Bangladesh has yet to approach through effective, targeted interventions.

Business sources further emphasized that the four upazilas of greater southern Cumilla possess immense potential for low-cost, rapid agro-based and fisheries-related industrialization due to their strategic geographical positioning. Historically renowned as the birthplace of Nawab Faizunnesa Chowdhuroni—a pioneering female icon of the Indian subcontinent—greater Laksam has centuries-old economic, cultural, and political heritage.

With national demographics indicating that out of roughly 180 million citizens, nearly 80 million belong to lower-middle-income brackets, 20 million live in extreme poverty, and the remaining 80 million comprise a slender upper crust of roughly 165,000 wealthy individuals alongside 6.35 million middle-class citizens, experts note that structural unemployment remains an inevitable systemic outcome in a society where nearly 60 percent experience financial vulnerability.

Local entrepreneurs have called for urgent, concerted public-private interventions to revitalize the regional economy and rescue the local workforce from ongoing stagnation.