MASSIVE irregularities were found at a Post Office building construction project. Many new office buildings under the project had construction faults and mismatches in the procurement system. The project implementation authority – Directorate of Post – had purchased 17 vehicles instead of three as mentioned in development project proposal (DPP), as per a local daily report.
The irregularities were detected at the Tk 1.35 billion “Construction of ICT-Based Rural Post Offices Project,” by the government’s project monitoring and evaluation body, IMED. The project was completed in 2017 and the monitoring and evaluation by a third party consultant of the IMED was completed in June this year.
According to the IMED, the Directorate of Post had built 600 new post offices instead of 750, repaired 1,269 post offices instead of 650, and bought 12,314 furniture instead of 6,000 (750 sets).The IMED team had visited 12 newly built Post Office buildings. It found cracks on the floors of two post offices while cracks on the walls of three buildings, cracks on the beams of two buildings, cracks on the columns of two buildings and low quality doors and windows at two other newly built post offices.
Corruption among our Civil Service members is something hardly new. Certain members of the bureaucracy have shown their ability to gobble up crores of takas of public funds. So neither the scope nor scale of corruption is new news to our citizens.
But what should be news is that the government is actively prosecuting those citizens who are government employees and pilfering public funds. The government has made it extremely difficult for even the ACC to press charges against government employees through the Sarkari Chakri Act 2018 thus providing crime prone employees with a sense of security. The bureaucrats know that all they have to do is to curry favour with the administration and there is a high chance that they will go off scot-free. Unless the administration is de-politicised there is no chance of corruption slowing down in the bureaucracy. The government has to decide what it wants —inefficient corrupt employees who are political or efficient, honest officers who may belong to any political affiliation. If the US can keep Dr Fauci in his post since 1984 — respective of which administration was in power, we can surely do the same. If someone honest is found, he or she should be allowed to keep their jobs regardless of which party is in power.
