Anil Wasif on Confronting Institutional Decay After the Dhaka School Tragedy | Policy Magazine

July 23, 2025 | Anil Wasif, MPP ’21, writes in Policy Magazine about the painful disconnect between high-level development discourse and lived tragedy, reflecting on the deadly crash of a military jet into a school in Dhaka, Bangladesh that claimed 32 lives. Writing from the World Bank’s Annual Conference on Development Economics, where he was attending as a Government Analytics fellow, Wasif describes how the academic conversation on institutional decay and populist anger mirrored the catastrophic reality unfolding in his home country. He critiques the global development narrative that celebrates economic growth metrics while ignoring institutional decay and the lived experiences of disillusioned youth. The Dhaka crash, he argues, is not an isolated failure but the result of decades of political dysfunction, hollowed-out institutions, and systemic hypocrisy.