Labor Unrest in the Ready-Made Garment Industry of Bangladesh : Causes and Consequences

Labor unrest is a very recurrent circumstance in the garment’s industry of Bangladesh. Violent protest and agitation by workers has become a common feature in garment’s industry. So take into account, we examine the main causes and consequences behind the labor unrest of Ready-Made Garment (RMG) industry in Bangladesh. Data for the study was collected from different garment factories of Dhaka, Ashulia, Tongi, Mirpur, Mohakhali, Gazipur, Narayangang and Savar. Face to face interview and questionnaire method have been used for collecting data of this study. The findings show that the low wage and long working hour are the main causes of labor unrest in the RMG industry of Bangladesh that, in turn, create job dissatisfaction. If the policy makers of RMG industry consider these causes and consequences and take required steps to overcome these problems, the labor unrest in garment industry will be eliminated. Additionally, we identify future research areas that provide scholars opportunities to push theoretical boundaries and offer further insights into the labor unres

An Efficient DOCSIS Upstream Equalizer

The advancement in the CATV industry has been remarkable. In the beginning, CATV provided a few television channels. Now it provides a variety of advanced services such as video on demand (VOD), Internet access, Pay-Per-View on demand and interactive TV. These advances have increased the popularity of CATV manyfold. Current improvements focus on interactive services with high quality. These interactive services require more upstream (transmission from customer premises to cable operator premises) channel bandwidth. The flow of data through the CATV network in both the upstream and downstream directions is governed by a standard referred to as the Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification (DOCSIS) standard. The latest version is DOCSIS 3.1, which was released in January 2014. The previous version, DOCSIS 3.0, was released in 2006. One component of the upstream communication link is the QAM demodulator. An important component in the QAM demodulator is the equalizer, whose purpose is to remove distortion caused by the imperfect upstream channel as well as the residual timing offset and frequency offset. Most of the timing and frequency offset are corrected by timing and frequency recovery circuits; what remains is referred to as offset. A DOCSIS receiver, and hence the equalizer within, can be implemented with ASIC or FPGA technology. Implementing an equalizer in an ASIC has a large nonrecurring engineering cost, but relatively small per chip production cost. Implementing equalizer in an FPGA has very low non-recurring cost, but a relatively high per chip cost. If the choice technology was based on cost, one would think it would depends only on the volume, but in practice that is not the case. The dominant factor when it comes to profit, is the time-to-market, which makes FPGA technology the only choice. The goal of this thesis is to design a cost optimized equalizer for DOCSIS upstream demodulator and implement in an FPGA. With this in mind, an important objective is to establish a relationship between the equalizer’s critical parameters and its performance. The parameter-performance relationship that has been established in this study revealed that equalizer step size and length parameters should be 1/64 and approximately 20 to yield a near optimum equalizer when considering the MER-convergence time trade-off. In the pursuit of the objective another relationship was established that is useful in determining the accuracy of the timing recovery circuit. That relationship establishes the sensitivity both of the MER and convergence time to timing offset. The equalizer algorithm was implemented in a cost effective manner using DSP Builder. The effort to minimize cost was focused on minimizing the number of multipliers. It is shown that the equalizer can be constructed with 8 multipliers when the proposed time sharing algorithm is implemented

The development of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and challenges of Environmental and Social Reporting in Bangladesh

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been recognised as corporation’s strategic tools to response the social obligation and corporation’s sustainability. The meaning and importance of CSR has been changed over time. At the inception, CSR was the obligation to pursue corporation policies and decision based on the desirable objectives and values of the society. But now corporate social responsibility is regarded as corporate sustainability and corporate citizenship. In this paper we have analysed content of 70 (Out of 123) audited corporate annual reports listed in the Dhaka Stock exchange of Bangladeshi companies. Realizing the importance of CSR we have attempted to find out the development of CSR, and formulate a strategic corporate CSR model for Bangladeshi Companies and justified the model compared with the international companies CSR activities. We have also identified the challenges of environmental and social reporting. We found that it is very hard to segregate environmental cost and social audit as they are arisen number of ways. The environment and social audit are not mandatory and should be reported in the notes to the financial statements. Key words: Corporate Social Responsibility, Strategic CSR Model, Challenges of Environmental costs, Social Reportin

An Integration of D-8 Countries with the Focus of Competitiveness, Opulence and Economic Accretion via the Advancement Of SMES: Bangladesh Perspective And Scope of Cooperation

Radical transmutation of technology and integrating and interrelationship with the world community facilitated economic proliferation and deplete multitudinous problems encompasses with the SME that is an inevitable and enviable subject matter in the global market for alleviating poverty, engender manifold employment opportunities, evolution of economic standard and exploring apparent resources. D-8 in their recent conglomeration exhibits their necessity to consolidate their strengthen and propitious approach for the purpose of propagation of collaboration and conciliation that indubitably prevailing propinquity and ensuring sustainable economic amelioration.  In Bangladesh, one of the D-8 members, development of SME sectors is an astounding appliance for accomplishing industrialization, attaining millennium development goals such as eradication of extreme poverty, developing a global partnership for development etc. Capital accumulations, business environment, indistinctive framework for SME are the major impediments in Bangladesh. Facilitating cross-border integration, cross national cooperation, cluster or network development, construction of international value chain, Public- private partnership and also to establish congruous strategies and programs within the internal infrastructure may assist to mitigate the predicaments and also comply with the commitment of local government for unremitting growth of SME in Bangladesh. Keywords: SME, D-8, Industrialization, MDG, cross-national cooperation, cluster development, interrelationship, public-private partnership

Challenges of Single Motherhood in Socio-Cultural Context: A Qualitative Study in Rural areas of Bangladesh

The growing number of divorces and separations induces the frequency of single mothers facing challenges in the mainstream socio-economic realities in Bangladesh. Past studies focused on structural aspects, economic hardship, and psychological issues of single mothers, mainly in the urban context. Nevertheless, the challenges in rural settings vary from urban single motherhood, and this aspect remains understudied. This qualitative narrative aims to analyse the challenges of single mothers in rural settings in Bangladesh. Twenty-eight in-depth interviews and ten key informant interviews were conducted using semi-structured interview guidelines. Thematic analysis identified four major themes of the rural single mothers’ challenges, social, economic, cultural, and psychological, leading a single mother to become dependent on other family members or relatives. The underlying factor of the challenges was the deprivation of property, patriarchal social structure, and social stigma. Rural single mothers face more complex challenges than urban ones because of the lack of income opportunities, insecurity, and self-dependencies. Findings will contribute to recommending and formulating a policy for the single mother considering the local realities of the rural single mothers in Bangladesh.

A Particle Swarm Based Algorithm for Functional Distributed Constraint Optimization Problems

Distributed Constraint Optimization Problems (DCOPs) are a widely studied constraint handling framework. The objective of a DCOP algorithm is to optimize a global objective function that can be described as the aggregation of a number of distributed constraint cost functions. In a DCOP, each of these functions is defined by a set of discrete variables. However, in many applications, such as target tracking or sleep scheduling in sensor networks, continuous valued variables are more suited than the discrete ones. Considering this, Functional DCOPs (F-DCOPs) have been proposed that is able to explicitly model a problem containing continuous variables. Nevertheless, the state-of-the-art F-DCOPs approaches experience onerous memory or computation overhead. To address this issue, we propose a new F-DCOP algorithm, namely Particle Swarm Based F-DCOP (PFD), which is inspired by a meta-heuristic, Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). Although it has been successfully applied to many continuous optimization problems, the potential of PSO has not been utilized in F-DCOPs. To be exact, PFD devises a distributed method of solution construction while significantly reducing the computation and memory requirements. Moreover, we theoretically prove that PFD is an anytime algorithm. Finally, our empirical results indicate that PFD outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches in terms of solution quality and computation overhead

Influence of Stakeholders in Developing Green Banking Products in Bangladesh

Environmental concern is trying to control the patterns of consumers’ consumption and behavior of manufacturing industries and business enterprises worldwide since climate change issues has been considered as a global challenge. After so many argumentations in the developed countries, it has become an incessant public endearment in the developing countries like Bangladesh, as the level of environmental deterioration has picked up to the mountains. Many measures have been taken into account while adapting to climate changes, but the actions are inconsistent in many cases especially in the financial sector (most appropriately in the banking sector). This study aims to highlight the supreme benefits, encountering challenges, strategic aspects of Green Banking with two major objectives. First one is to caricature the existing scenario of green banking practice in Bangladesh and the other one is to accentuate how individual and also institutional stakeholder forces such as regulatory, managerial or environmental, that can affect the deliberate environmental behavior of banks performing in Bangladesh. The findings suggest that banks should go green and play a pro-active role to take environmental aspects for functional improvements and changing client habits in banking business. Use of appropriate environmental technologies and management systems will not only be useful for environment, but also provide benefits as greater operational efficiencies. After using both descriptive and inferential statistics analysis, this study also advocacy for the necessity of stakeholder’s influences in green banking practice and recommend some indication for Government, the whole banking sector and for the business community

Performance Optimization of Solar Photovoltaic System using Parabolic Trough and Fresnel Mirror Solar Concentrator

An attempt has been taken to design parabolic trough and Fresnel mirror solar concentrator with the purpose of optimizing the output power of a photovoltaic system for both bright sunny day and cloudy day by using a 72-cell 5W photovoltaic solar panel. The PV system's efficiency has been analyzed in terms of output voltage, current, and power of the solar panel. Accordingly to our expectation, we observed that on a bright sunny day, the output power improvement of the solar panel is 26.81% for the parabolic trough and 17.89% for the Fresnel mirror concentrator. On a cloudy day, both concentrators improve output power by 22.3% and 14.1%, respectively. In terms of power optimization of a photovoltaic system, the following has been discerned: a solar photovoltaic concentrator system with a parabolic trough is much more effective than one with a Fresnel mirror

Disclosure of Corporate Governance in Banking Sector of Bangladesh

Securities and Exchange Commission in Bangladesh set some rules about the Corporate Governance in 2006 and advises the listed company to follow those rules to ensure proper Corporate Governance. The main purpose of this study is to know about the disclosure of checklist of Corporate Governance in the banking sector of Bangladesh. Certain analysis was done to conduct this study like- dichotomous and partial compliance to find out the Overall disclosure Index. Chi-square test and cross tabulation are used to find relation between certain variables. Besides, Correlation and regression was performed to analysis those factors that influences the disclosure of Corporate Governance. Annual report of 2011 for 30 banks enlisted under Dhaka Stock Exchange (DSE) has been used to conduct this study. Certain results like higher proportion of independent directors’ gives higher disclosure of corporate governance and more insider ownership results less corporate governance have been found. Recent scam in banking sector is also the result lack of corporate governance in Bangladesh. This research can be used to minimize that scam in the corporate culture. This study creates values not only to those banks but also to the other stakeholders who are related to this. Investors and creditors decision can be influenced by this study. Keywords:Corporate Governance, Dhaka Stock Exchange (DSE), Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC), Disclosure, Banks etc

Structure, Morphology and Opto-Electrical Properties of Nanostructured Indium Doped SnO2 Thin Films Deposited by Thermal Evaporation

Indium doped Tin oxide (SnO2: In) thin films of various thicknesses (200-600 nm) with fixed 2% indium (In) concentration were prepared by thermal evaporation method onto glass substrates under high vacuum (10-6 Torr). As deposited films were vacuum annealed at 200o C for 60 minutes. The structure, optical, electrical and morphology properties of SnO2: In thin films were investigated as a function of film thickness. The XRD analysis revealed that films were polycrystalline in nature with a tetragonal structure having (110) plane as the preferred orientation. The average crystalline size increased from 34.8 to 51.25 nm with increase of film thicknesses. The surface morphology of the doped films was obtained by Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) and Field Emission Scanning Electron Microscope (FESEM). Optical transmittance was obtained from a double beam UV-Vis- NIR spectrophotometer. Maximum transmittance varied from 65-76% in the visible range of the spectrum. Optical band gap (Eg) varied between 2.89 and 3.20 eV. The resistivity of SnO2: In thin films was as high as 105 Ω-cm. Activation energy of the films were found to be 0.18 to 0.47 eV for 300-600 nm film thicknesses. Due to high optical band gap and high electrical resistivity, these nanostructured films can be used in optoelectronic devices especially as opto-insulator