THE government has paid no attention towards rural industrialization as over 8,000 applications for getting power supply to set up industries have been pending for years with the Rural Electrification Board (REB). Despite taking vigorous development attempts to develop urban centers by all successive governments, rural Bangladesh, which makes up 73 percent of the population, has been marked as ineffectual in terms of human resource mobilization. Since the inception of the country, the urban-rural gap has been widening and the rural societies have become static and lethargic due to the attention paid to urban centers instead of promoting agronomy and agro-based industrialization. Though the Constitution commends the government to narrow the urban-rural gap, the rural societies in which the majority of people reside remain out of government’s development purview.
As per a national daily report, applications from 8,490 more entrepreneurs seeking power supply for setting up factories remained pending with the REB since 2007. Earlier, the REB provided new power connections to entrepreneurs for setting up 3,500 industries. Insiders said that to be able to provide the connections to the pending applicants REB would require additional power supply to the tune of 1,130MW. If REB fails to meet the required power demands for rural industrialization balanced development will remain a dream.
As consecutive governments lacked a coherent policy in the area, power connections were extended arbitrarily attaching no priority to industrial connection seekers. Moreover, rural power supply infrastructure is a major problem affecting reliable supply.
Without focusing on new power generation, the REB recently proposed to increase the tariff for industrial, irrigational and domestic users citing the board sustains losses for the power that it supplies to cover the low-income families as well as the irrigation pumps. Article 16 of the Constitution stipulates, ‘The State shall adopt effective measures to bring about a radical transformation in the rural areas through the promotion of an agricultural revolution, the provision of rural electrification, the development of cottage and other industries, and the improvement of education, communications and public health, in those areas, so as progressively remove the disparity in the standards of living between the urban and the rural areas.’ How much the Constitution has been followed in rural development is a big question.
While the country may face a severe unemployment situation in the future as many migrant workers might come back from most Middle-East countries due to economic slowdowns there, the government must focus on setting up employment generating small and medium scale industries. The gigantic infrastructure development remains an ideal yet to be fulfilled and we need infrastructure development definitely, but the true sense of development should include investments in human resources by capitalizing on our demographic dividends. For that to occur rural electrification for rural industrialization must be prioritized. This will in chain effect create jobs and revitalize the agro-economy of the country.
