LAWMAKERS at a virtual discussion on Wednesday suggested adopting strategies in the eighth Five Year Plan (FYP) to reduce inequality and create skilled human resources. They also demanded stern actions against corruption in the plan.
Saber Hossain Chowdhury, a member of the Parliament Standing Committee on Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, said while addressing a view exchange meeting on the eighth five year plan that the five-year plan calls for good economic governance. The demand for forming a banking commission has remained unheard for a long time.
At the heart of everything is the true cause of our reduced capacity for economic progress — corruption. We need skilled manpower but our technical institutes are full of corruption. Then how would the country find the needed skilled workers to create economic growth.
We need low cost capital to develop our industrial infrastructure but our banks, instead of tightened regulatory methods Bangladesh Bank is making it easier to help defaulters. The easing of loan classification and write-off standards and announcing generous rescheduling facility to the defaulters last year is yet another attempt to return to a financial regulation regime that we successfully got out of several decades ago.
The deterioration of credit quality, with Non Performing Loans (NPLs) significantly increasing in recent years in the context of weakly capitalised banks, raises concerns about the capacity of the financial sector to continue supporting economic growth. Increased regulatory forbearance of the kind seen recently in Bangladesh compounded the problem of NPLs.
Our public tendering process is opaque and not transparent which makes it quite easy to siphon off funds from the public exchequer to pad the wallets of the corrupt public servants. That’s why our highway construction costs are among the worlds highest by several times and why the hard earned taxed money of the private sector goes to waste in fuelling this corruption.
No nation can improve if the capacity for corruption exists. Bangladesh has been lucky so far because we have been growing from a very low economic baseline. However as the years progress it will be significantly harder to increase our growth because corruption will eat away at our international competitiveness and thus make it harder to sell our products in the long run, thus eroding our balance of payments.
Ultimately the government by itself has been unable to do much to reduce corruption. It has increased the pay of public servants but this has not diminished the levels of corruption. Unless the tendency of the public officials who have real power change significantly to serve the nation instead of looking after their narrow self interests, the ability of the nation to develop rapidly will be continually eroded as unscrupulous people from both public and private sectors will take advantage to fatten their wallets.
