Academic and Reference Books

This book includes selected papers on crop suitability and agricultural development based on the author's extensive experience with soils and agricultural development in Bangladesh. Written between 1974 and 1989, the papers range from popular journal articles to formal reports to Government. The successive chapters, updated by footnotes, provide a realistic appraisal of the opportunities for increasing agricultural production in Bangladesh's diverse environments.

The liberal democratic values and the constitutional system have suffered serial reversals in Bangladesh, accompanied by a trend towards authoritarian and unaccountable government. The failure of the political system and politicians is blamed conventionally. That alone cannot explain the reversals sufficiently; the deep conflict of secular nationalism and liberal democracy with communal and authoritarian political culture explain the political and constitutional regresses.

The decade preceding the 1947 Indian partition was an eventful period, with profound impact on the subsequent political developments of the states thus created. Though works dealing with this period abound, most of these have an all-India focus. There is a dearth of research-based books and other works covering the Bengal situation. Bengal, then a Muslim-majority province in eastern India, was the bastion of the Muslim League/Pakistan movement.

Committees are ubiquitous. They are found in all types of legislatures- large or small, old or new. Parliamentary committees are important because they can provide a number of values that are not easily available otherwise. However, although it is widely acknowledged that committees have greater resilience in Congressional and Continental systems than in Westminster-style democracies, there are not many studies that explore variations in committee influence and impact in the latter. This volume intends to fill this gap.