Cox’s Bazar and Sundarbans

Photo: Azizur Rahim Peu / Driknews

It was learnt that New Seven Wonders Authority (N7WA) dropped two natural sites of Bangladesh — Cox’s Bazar & the Sundarbans– from the list of natural wonders of the world on account of certain irregularity. The said irregularity, as reported by the media, was casting of more than one vote from one e-mail ID from certain websites.

We also found some websites or facebook applications where more than one vote could be cast. Further, it was also noticed that confirmation of the vote by opening return mail from N7W to the voter’s e-mail account was not required. It is truly confusing and does not match with the prescribed guideline of the N7W authorities, but many people used those sites/pages without knowing what could be the consequences.

Possible measures on the part of N7WA could be to discard those votes or block those sites and applications. Instead of doing that, N7WA dropped the number one and two contending natural sites from the contest and we do not know if this is a permanent measure. N7WA must have designed some system to cancel fake votes, which clearly failed and they took unjust punitive measures against competing natural sites.

If, for example, the same people who opened sites having anomalies as mentioned above open similar websites to cast fake votes in favour of another competing site, say Mount Everest; will N7WA drop Mt. Everest from the list too and if they do that will that be proper?

We expect immediate return of Cox’s Bazar and the Sundarbans to the contest in order to ensure a fair process of selection, so that N7W’s endeavour gets global acceptance as a selection based on fair practice.

Source: The Daily Star