Tara Mia, a farmer from Natore, had been invited to the Fire Service and Civil Defence Directorate in Dhaka after a video of his handmade child-rescue cage became popular on social media. In a 40-foot artificially dug pit, his wire contraption uses a thread-operated locking mechanism to retrieve a 15-kg dummy without a hitch. The director general praised him warmly and promised to explore the device’s technical merits for actual rescue operations.
Tara Mia built the cage after a child died in a pit in Tanore, Rajshahi, last year. He watched the news, felt the helplessness, and went to his workshop. There was no research grant, institutional support, or engineering degree—just the moral discomfort of a man who could not look away.
Tara Mia is not an anomaly. He is, in fact, a type recognisable across the country. Somewhere right now, a young microbiology graduate is sitting on a thesis that has cost him his own savings, not his institution’s. A researcher pays out of her own pocket when her research requires a reagent or component. These are stories of systemic abandonment wearing the costume of individual perseverance.
The people doing the work are not given a platform, the procurement contracts, or the positions. The graduate with genuine curiosity ends up sitting for a BCS exam, not because civil service is his vocation, but because it appears to be the only legible path to stability. And the ones who refuse that bargain, who hold out for something more aligned with what they actually studied and care about, frequently find themselves on a flight to Toronto or Melbourne: not out of desire, but out of exhaustion.
Among 176 countries, Bangladesh scored 6.7 out of 10 in the “Human Flight and Brain Drain 2024” index, against a global average of 4.98, surpassing neighbours India and Pakistan, both of whom scored below 5.5. A British Council study titled “Next Generation Bangladesh 2024” found that 55 percent of young people between the ages of 18 and 35 wish to migrate abroad. These are numbers about institutional failure.
India offers an instructive parallel of a policy choice. The National Innovation Foundation (NIF), established under India’s Department of Science and Technology in 2000, was built to unleash the creativity of the informal sector. Its parent network, the Honey Bee Network, pioneered the documentation and recognition of non-institutional inventors across rural India. To honour these innovators, the Indian president himself presented awards at multiple ceremonies.
This is not merely symbolic. NIF also established Grassroots Innovation Design by Students (GRIDS) clubs, encouraging students of engineering, agriculture, and pharmacy to work alongside grassroots innovators. The state created an institutional bridge between the formal knowledge economy and the informal ingenuity that precedes it. In November 2024, the Honey Bee Network Creativity and Inclusive Innovation Awards provided grassroots innovators a platform to connect with investors, policymakers, and technical experts, along with guidance on getting funding, intellectual property rights, and policy assistance. NIF has received over 166 inquiries from 33 countries for 54 technologies originally documented through the network: rural Indian solutions finding global relevance because the state chose to formalise, not merely acknowledge, grassroots creativity.
There is no institutional architecture that would have found Natore’s Tara Mia if he hadn’t found luck on viral media. No fund would have supported him before the cage was built, and there exists no mechanism to protect his idea, incubate its refinement, or connect him to engineers who could make it production-ready.
The graduates are in roles mismatched with their training. The young researchers who have the technical depth to contribute to specific fields are stuck in procurement queues or navigating nepotistic hiring committees. Meanwhile, the positions that require creative technical thinking are occupied by people whose primary qualification was availability, not aptitude.
Unesco data shows that in 2023, over 52,800 Bangladeshi students went abroad for higher education, more than three times the number in 2008. The graduates are not leaving without pain. Many of them would prefer to stay if staying meant being taken seriously. The combined weight of economic instability, systemic nepotism, and professional invisibility is quietly driving this generation out of the country. Every farmer who invents, every graduate who self-funds, every researcher who quietly does the work without being asked: they are offering something to this country that the country has not yet learned to receive with consistency.
The officials who invited Tara Mia showed what receiving can look like. The harder task is to build the structures that make such recognition routine rather than remarkable, systemic rather than serendipitous. What is being lost in the meantime is not abstract. It has names, and most of them are boarding flights.
Nafew Sajed Joy has a master's degree in social sciences from Dhaka University. He can be reached at [email protected].
