Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is on a five-day visit to the United States. After attending the U.N. General Assembly, he spoke to a sold-out crowd of more than 20,000 on Sunday at Madison Square Garden in New York.

“India has a lot of opportunities,” he told a jubilant crowd. “I have recently launched an initiative. I invite the whole world and everyone sitting here. I invite everyone to participate in ‘Make in India.’” It’s a plan to make development and progress a popular movement.

Modi, who is trying to strengthen relations with the U.S., will be meeting President Barack Obama for talks in Washington. Ties between India and the U.S. haven’t always been smooth, but relations have warmed over the past couple of decades.

In the 1960s India initially took a neutral stance between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, becoming one of the founding members of the Non-Aligned Movement. But in 1971, New Delhi signed the Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation with the Soviet Union and moved away from Washington. 

There was a brief thaw in relations in the early 1990s after economic reforms by India meant to expand ties with the U.S., but that goodwill deteriorated after New Delhi announced a series of underground nuclear tests near the border with Pakistan, leading to economic sanctions from Washington.

After a private dinner with Obama on Monday, Modi plans to meet six American CEOs one on one, including Goldman Sachs’ Lloyd Blankfein and General Electric’s Jeff Immelt.

But not everyone is a Modi fan. Four months after taking office, he remains a controversial figure. Al Jazeera’s Shihab Rattansi spoke to protesters outside Madison Square Garden, who told him Modi should be treated like a criminal rather than a rock star.

Many people are upset over his handling of unrest in Gujarat state in 2002, when he was chief minister there. Anti-Muslim riots left more than 1,000 people dead, and Modi, a Hindu nationalist, was accused of doing little to stop the killing.

Also, he made controversial changes at the state level by diluting the powers of ministries and concentrating them in his office.

During Al Jazeera America’s Sunday night segment The Week Ahead, Thomas Drayton discussed U.S.-India relations with Michael Kugelman, a senior associate on Southeast Asia at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., and with Anubhav Gupta, senior program officer at the Asia Society Policy Institute.

“Both Prime Minister Modi and President Obama have an excellent opportunity to take a relationship that is already at a pretty good footing and really re-energize the relationship and take it forward for the next two years,” said Gupta.

More recently, the two nations have managed to find more common ground. They are now cooperating on defense matters, even though that necessitates a delicate balancing act for the U.S. as it tries to maintain ties with Pakistan. But in an attempt to counter India’s neighbor and rival Pakistan, Washington has given New Delhi more than $9 billion worth of defense equipment and security systems since 2001.

Kugelman says the relationship is critical from a security perspective.

“Despite all their differences and disagreements, India and the United States really see very similarly when it comes to terrorism and what to do about it.”

Kugelman said the U.S. and India feel similarly about the rise of China and its increasing clout. “I think the U.S. believes India can essentially serve as perhaps a counterbalance to China’s increasing presence and influence throughout the Asia region,” he said.

U.S.-Indian trade in goods and services is at nearly $150 billion per year. A recent study by the Confederation of Indian Industry shows that U.S. investment in India is at about $28 billion and that Indian companies have boosted employment in the U.S. by investing nearly $17 billion through 68 companies.

“This is a honeymoon period,” said Kugelman. “Modi is relatively new in power, there are still a lot of festering tensions, and we don’t really know what could happen. I think this is really meant to be symbolic more than anything else.”

An alleged double-homicide by a 17-year-old-girl in Bangladesh last month has shed new light on the nation's widespread drug problem.

Youth make up the majority of the country's estimated five million drug addicts. And in a place where there isn't much public awareness of the problem, finding help poses a major challenge.

The teenager, now in custody, is accused of working with a friend to stab her parents to death in their sleep. Police say she was angry with them for not allowing her to leave the house because of her drug problem. Her father served as a special branch police inspector.

The girl was addicted to yaba, a tablet made of methamphetamine and caffeine, imported from neighbouring Myanmar. Yaba has become popular among young people in the country, serving as a powerful stimulant.

The teenager has not yet publicly admitted to the allegations against her. Police have also detained her friend suspected of involvement in the crime, as well as the maid who worked in the house.

The education ministry has reportedly called on private universities to install CCTV cameras on their campuses in an attempt to monitor drug abuse amongst students.

And the government is trying to crack down on illegal drugs being smuggled into the country. But trying to tackle the underground drug epidemic is proving to be a massive undertaking.

What once was her right arm is now just a stub lying limp next to her torso. She sits with a far-away look in her eyes and a sad smile. Morium Begum was working inside Rana Plaza when it collapsed, in what has been dubbed the deadliest garment factory accident in history.
"I was stuck in the rubble for three days," said the 30-year-old. "There were about 10 of us in one place. At first, no-one outside could hear us. We couldn't tell if it was night or day. I could feel the blood falling from my arm. It was already severed and hanging by the skin."
More than 1,000 people died, and a further 2,000 were injured, on April 24 in the Savar sub-district of Bangladesh's capital, Dhaka. The scale of the accident prompted a massive rescue effort and tremendous media attention, but many questions remain about where the responsibility for such calamities lies, and if anything has really changed.
On Saturday, the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BGMEA) took part in a workshop ahead of a meeting with the North American Alliance for Bangladesh Workers Safety. The collaborated effort aims to create an Alliance Accord and a National Action Plan to come up with common standards to implement across all garment factories in Bangladesh. The workshop was attended by the Secretaries of Bangladesh's Ministries of Labour, Foreign Affairs, and Commerce, as well as an official from Alliance and the US ambassador to Bangladesh.

Factory owners
On that fateful morning, Begum says they were not supposed to be at work. The factory had been closed early the previous morning, but her supervisor ordered everyone to return the next day - threatening to withhold an entire month's wages.

"We informed our employees to leave the day before the collapse," says Shahidullah Azim, vice-president of BGMEA. "We told the factory management that the building was designated an abandoned factory and was meant to be vacated."
But factory managers and the building's owner, Sohel Rana, reportedly insisted the employees return to work. Rana is now in custody after trying to flee to neighbouring India, but many fear he may try to use government connections to escape punishment. Rana had ties with the Jubo League, the youth wing of the ruling Awami League party. The government, however, has distanced itself from Rana since his arrest.
Factory owners are often under a tremendous amount of pressure by foreign investors to deliver their products on time, said Azim.

Challenges
Often shipments are delayed by general strikes or other unforeseen circumstances. Factory owners have to pay extra to transfer their goods from sea to air shipments, a costly alternative.

"We have to stay competitive," said Jahander Rashid, of Harun Garment Industries. "This is a buyer's market, not a seller's market, and if we don't keep our prices competitive and deliver on time, our factories will be empty."
Rashid says he was watching the news in the aftermath of the accident, and saw people holding protest signs in Canada saying: "Don't buy Bangladeshi goods." But in a country with a four million-strong workforce in the garment industry, he says this is counterproductive.
Eighty percent of garment workers are women - and many of them are keeping families out of poverty.
Musammat Bulbuli lives in Bogra, about five hours north of the capital. She lost her 22-year-old daughter, Molita, in the Rana Plaza disaster. "I don't know what to do now," she said. "My daughter left behind two girls, aged five and two. She ran her household and took care of her family because her husband could only land odd jobs."

Shifting sands
As Bangladesh's clothing industry has expanded over the past several decades, factories have moved from residential compounds to commercial areas. Many are in buildings shared with other businesses. Now efforts are being made to separate the factories into their own compounds, so they can be built according to specific needs and can be regulated better.

Azim of BGMEA says steps have been taken since the Rana Plaza disaster to regulate building facilities. In addition to fire safety, labour, and management cells, they now have 12 engineers on BGMEA's staff.
BGMEA is also encouraging factory owners to shift generators from building rooftops to the ground floor. Vibrations from the generators on the upper floors of Rana Plaza caused the walls to crack. The building was also only built for office space, and the upper floors were reportedly added without building permits.
BGMEA has also established a fire safety hotline for workers, and has begun a safety crash course for mid-level factory management and supervisors.

"We don't want donations, as they don't always reach the people who need it," says Azim. "We need minimum interest loans with long-term payback, so we can move factories to their own designated areas.         
 "We need to focus on ethical buying. We need to be able to negotiate better with foreign investors and stand down an offer if it doesn't meet our standards."
He explained that ethical buying consists of companies purchasing goods from places that have proper workers' rights in place, not just the cheapest labour to turn a maximum profit.

Government failures
Bulbuli said that Bkash Limited, a subsidiary of BRAC Bank, paid for her daughter's burial - but the government only gave her around $260 as compensation. She comes to Enam Hospital in Savar, where most of the victims were taken after the accident, to look for assistance.

The chairman of Enam Medical College and Hospital, Dr Enamur Rahman, says the hospital gave treatment and food for free to the victims in the aftermath: "Our policy is treatment first, business later."
He says the government has told him it would reimburse his expenses - a cheque he has yet to receive.
Rahman says most of the victims had blunt injuries usually caused by impact, and about half of them had fractured limbs. Of the 26 amputees, nine of them were at his hospital.

One of those was Morium.

Practical challenges
Morium now plans to return to her parents' house in Barisal. She says the government issued her compensation of around $15,000, to be given in $125 monthly instalments.

But she says she can only retrieve the payments from the Sonali Bank in Savar, and can't access it from other branches around the country. That will require her to pay a round-trip train fare of around $20 each month to collect the money.

For now, however, she hopes to make the most of her situation; a situation that the international community can hopefully learn from - so as to avoid history repeating itself.