The persistence of this planning tradition itself merits examination. Bangladesh's Planning Commission, housed in the modernist Sher-e-Bangla Nagar administrative district of Dhaka, has consistently produced comprehensive development blueprints that would impress any international development agency. These documents, running hundreds of pages with detailed sectoral analyses and projections, represent enormous investments of technocratic energy. Yet the country's most dramatic successes like the ready-made garment (RMG) industry explosion that transformed Bangladesh into the world's second-largest apparel exporter, the remittance-driven growth that now accounts for nearly 6 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP), and the microfinance expansion that reached millions of unbanked citizens, emerged largely outside these formal planning frameworks.
Consider the RMG sector's evolution. Now employing over four million workers and generating $45 billion in annual exports, this industry grew through private entrepreneurship responding to global market signals rather than state direction. The first garment factories in the late 1970s weren't envisioned in any five-year plan; they emerged when Korean firms sought quota-free export platforms and Bangladeshi entrepreneurs seized the opportunity. The Planning Commission's documents from that era focused on jute and heavy industries, missing entirely the transformative potential of labour-intensive manufacturing. This pattern of development happening despite rather than because of planning suggests that Bangladesh's remarkable resilience lies more in its people's adaptive capacity than in planning precision.
THE SDG EXAMPLE - PROMISES AND PARADOXES: Bangladesh has been lauded internationally for its commitment to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), integrating all 17 goals into its planning architecture with apparent thoroughness. The government aligned its Seventh and Eighth Five-Year Plans with SDG targets, creating elaborate monitoring frameworks, establishing dedicated units within ministries, and developing sophisticated data collection systems. International observers praised this comprehensive approach, with UN agencies regularly citing Bangladesh as a model for SDG integration into national planning.
Progress on specific indicators has indeed been notable. Poverty reduction metrics show dramatic improvement, with the proportion of people living below the national poverty line falling from over 40 per cent in 2005 to around 20 per cent today. Maternal mortality has declined substantially, from 194 per 100,000 live births in 2010 to approximately 123 in recent years. Gender parity in primary education, once thought impossible in a traditional society, has been achieved and sustained. These achievements feature prominently in government communications and international development forums.
However, critical gaps expose the limitations of planning in complex social systems. Environmental targets remain severely off-track despite repeated planning commitments and international pledges. Dhaka's air quality ranks among the world's worst, with PM2.5 levels routinely exceeding WHO guidelines by factors of five or six. The city's rivers, once the lifeblood of commerce and culture, have become toxic streams despite numerous cleanup plans dating back decades. Deforestation continues at alarming rates in the Chittagong Hill Tracts and Sundarbans, even as planning documents emphasise forest conservation. The disconnect between environmental planning rhetoric and ground reality is so stark that it raises questions about whether these plans serve any purpose beyond international image management.
Similarly, inequality has widened dramatically, contradicting official targets and undermining the inclusive growth narrative. The Gini coefficient has deteriorated, wealth concentration has intensified, and spatial disparities between Dhaka and peripheral districts have grown. Planning documents speak of balanced regional development, yet investment continues to concentrate in the capital and Chittagong, leaving vast swathes of the country marginalised. The persistence of these disparities despite repeated planning cycles suggests that plans cannot overcome the economic forces driving concentration.
THE UNCOMFORTABLE TRUTH - PLANNING AS THEATRE: The gap between planning aspiration and development reality in Bangladesh reflects deeper structural issues that technocratic reforms alone cannot address. Planning documents have evolved into ritualistic exercises-elaborate performances that satisfy multiple audiences while changing little on the ground. They reassure international donors that Bangladesh follows "best practices," provide civil servants with familiar bureaucratic routines, and offer politicians platforms for announcing grand visions. Yet their connection to actual resource allocation and policy implementation remains tenuous at best.
This theatrical quality becomes evident when examining the planning process itself. Consultations occur in a context where outcomes are often predetermined and ratified through orchestrated discussions. Consultants typically recycle templates from other countries or periods that tend to miss Bangladesh's unique dynamics. Government officials, knowing that political decisions will ultimately override technical recommendations, participate half-heartedly. The result is documents that read impressively but reflect neither ground reality nor political possibility or a bold vision for the future.
The Planning Commission's influence has waned precipitously as line ministries pursue independent agendas driven by ministerial preferences and political cycles rather than long-term plans. The Ministry of Power develops energy strategies based on immediate pressures and available financing rather than integrated resource planning. The Ministry of Education launches new initiatives responding to public criticism rather than systematic educational planning. This fragmentation means that even well-designed plans would struggle for implementation, but Bangladesh's plans often lack even internal coherence.
Resource allocation patterns reveal this disconnect starkly. Annual budgets frequently deviate dramatically from plan priorities, with political considerations consistently trumping technical rationality. Infrastructure projects emerge from electoral calculations-a bridge here to satisfy a powerful constituency, a highway there to connect a minister's home district-rather than systematic transportation planning. Social protection schemes expand through ministerial initiatives responding to immediate political pressures, not planning directives based on poverty analysis. The result is a dual system: formal plans that satisfy international donors and provide technocratic legitimacy, existing alongside informal decision-making processes that actually shape development outcomes.
Moreover, Bangladesh's genuine success stories emerged precisely because they operated outside heavy-handed planning frameworks. The garment industry flourished in regulatory gaps where bureaucratic interference was minimal. Remittance flows grew through informal networks that no planner anticipated or facilitated. Microfinance expanded through NGO innovation that the government initially viewed with suspicion. Mobile financial services revolutionised rural finance through private sector innovation, not planned financial inclusion strategies. The state's inability to control these sectors paradoxically enabled their dynamism, raising a provocative question: has planning been merely irrelevant to Bangladesh's development, or has its very weakness been a hidden strength, allowing entrepreneurial energy to flourish unconstrained by bureaucratic direction?
TO PLAN OR NOT TO PLAN - REIMAGINING THE POSSIBLE: Complete abandonment of planning would be reckless, potentially creating coordination failures that markets cannot resolve. Planning serves essential functions that remain valid: coordinating large-scale infrastructure investments where network effects matter, allocating scarce public resources across competing priorities, signalling government intentions to private actors who need policy predictability, and maintaining international credibility in an aid-dependent economy. The challenge lies not in whether to plan but in fundamentally reconceptualising what planning means in Bangladesh's context.
The way forward requires honest reckoning about what planning can and cannot achieve in a complex, rapidly changing society. Rather than comprehensive blueprints attempting to direct all economic activity-a conceit inherited from socialist planning models-Bangladesh needs strategic intervention in areas where market failures are acute and government action is essential. Climate adaptation, given Bangladesh's extreme vulnerability, demands coordinated planning that markets cannot provide. Urban infrastructure in rapidly growing cities requires forward-looking spatial planning to prevent further chaos. Education quality and healthcare systems need systematic planning to address massive service delivery gaps. For sectors where markets work reasonably well-agriculture responding to price signals, light manufacturing adjusting to global demand, services evolving with consumer preferences-planning should be minimal and enabling rather than directive.
THE DECENTRALISATION IMPERATIVE: Bangladesh's hyper-centralised planning model, reinforced by donor preferences for single negotiating counterparts, is fundamentally incompatible with a country of 170 million people exhibiting vast regional diversity. The assumption that technocrats in Dhaka can meaningfully plan for tea gardens in Sylhet, shrimp farms in Khulna, and char dwellers in Rangpur is not just unrealistic but counterproductive. Genuine decentralisation of planning authority to ministries, departments, and local governments is imperative for planning to become relevant.
Ministerial-level planning autonomy should be expanded significantly, recognising that line ministries understand sectoral realities far better than generalists in the Planning Commission. The Health Ministry, staffed with public health professionals, should drive health planning based on epidemiological evidence and health system realities. The Education Ministry should control education strategy, understanding the complex dynamics of teacher motivation and student learning. The Planning Commission's role should shift from micromanagement to coordination and quality assurance, ensuring that sectoral plans align without dictating their content.
This transformation requires fundamental reforms in how government operates. Ministries need budgetary authority over multi-year allocations aligned with their plans, not annual budgets divorced from strategy and subject to mid-year cuts. Performance accountability must shift from compliance with planning documents to actual outcomes-health improvements, learning achievements, infrastructure quality. Technical capacity building within ministries is essential, strengthening policy units with planning expertise rather than concentrating all analytical capacity in the Planning Commission.
District and upazila-level planning must evolve from cosmetic exercises to meaningful processes shaping resource allocation. Currently, local government plans are elaborate documents that no one reads and everyone ignores. Genuine fiscal decentralization, with local governments controlling 20-25 per cent of public expenditure rather than the current 5-7 per cent, would align planning with local needs and enable experimentation. Different districts could test different approaches to service delivery, creating natural policy laboratories for learning what works in Bangladesh's diverse contexts.
THE REAL BATTLE - FROM PAPER TO PROGRESS: Planning documents proliferate while implementation remains scarce. This is Bangladesh's core development challenge, rooted in political economy barriers that technical solutions cannot overcome. Powerful interests benefit from the current dysfunction where plans provide cover for arbitrary decision-making. Implementation threatens rent-seeking opportunities embedded in procurement processes, established hierarchies that control resource flows, and patronage networks that sustain political power. No amount of technical planning reform can overcome these barriers without sustained political will and systemic changes in how government functions.
The path forward requires multiple simultaneous interventions. Results-based financing must replace input-based budgeting, shifting from tracking money spent to measuring outcomes achieved. Performance-based grants to ministries and local governments, with funding tied to measurable results like vaccination coverage, learning assessments, or road quality indices, create incentives for implementation rather than planning compliance alone.
Transparent, real-time monitoring systems using digital platforms must make plan targets, budget allocations, and implementation progress publicly visible, enabling social accountability. Citizen feedback mechanisms should allow communities to report non-implementation directly, creating bottom-up pressure that bureaucratic systems cannot ignore. The proliferation of mobile phones makes such systems technically feasible; political resistance, not technical barriers, prevents their deployment.
Institutional incentives within the civil service need fundamental restructuring. Promotions and rewards must prioritise implementation success over document production, creating career incentives for delivery rather than planning. Implementation units within each ministry, staffed with motivated professionals on fast-track career paths, could attract talent to execution rather than paper-pushing. The current system, where planning document authors receive recognition while implementers remain invisible, guarantees continued implementation failure.
Above all, Bangladesh must acknowledge the uncomfortable truth that comprehensive central planning is neither possible nor desirable in a complex market economy. The country needs smarter, leaner, more focused planning that acknowledges its limitations while maximising strategic value where government action matters most. This requires political courage to abandon comforting fictions, technical expertise to design better systems, and social pressure to demand actual development rather than planning theatrics. Only when the gap between planning rhetoric and institutional reality closes can Bangladesh's remarkable potential be fully realized.
The writer is Chairman, Taskforce on Economic Re-Strategisation and Mobilising Resources for Equitable and Sustainable Growth; and Former Director-General, Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies (BIDS).
kasmurshid@gmail.com