Finance Minister AHM Mustafa Kamal on Monday said there will have some misuse of funds and disruption of the development activities and they have to tolerate those.
"Misuse and distortion have taken place in Malaysia, Indonesia and other countries across the globe. But we are trying so that it can be curbed and do not cross the limit," he said after meeting with a diplomat and a lending agency chief.
He said: "Entire investments we are furnishing are not being used qualitatively. We have some errors and deviations in our development works which impair some of our economic growth."
The finance minister made the observations while briefing journalists at his Sher-e-Bangla Nagar office in Dhaka after Ambassador of the European Union in Bangladesh Ms Rensje Terrink and Country Manager of International Finance Corporation (IFC) Ms Wendy Werner made courtesy call on him.
When asked about a recent remark of the Prime Minister about the misuse of development funds, Mr Kamal said she (PM) is right and she is talking correctly.
"I thanked the PM for her steps against corruption and I believe that it will help us reach our goal before three years of our target," the minister said.
About the World Bank's study on fund misuse in the development projects, Mr Kamal said: "Their data may be correct or not. I will not dispute. But we do our work in our own way and they do their work in their way."
The finance minister said: "Look, we have started with that country where once there was no road and bridge on the way to go to school. We are now lucky that we have developed a lot from that situation. So, we want to take it as a base."
Once it was a dream whether we would be able to build Padma Bridge, Karnaphuli Tunnel or MRT line, he added.
"Since we do not have that capacity and skills to build those things, so there will be distortion and misuse of funds and we have to tolerate those to some extent," he said.
Mr Kamal said: "The Prime Minister is also trying to curb misuse of the money. When we will be able to build all highly technical infrastructures by our own technology, corruption will fall automatically."
"Day by day the skills and capacity of our local contractors will go up. They will engage in the development works more. Then misuse of development funds will be reducing," he added.
Briefing on the discussions with the diplomats, Mr Kamal said they had asked him about the sustainability of our higher gross domestic product (GDP) growth.
"We have informed them that Bangladesh's economy will grow at double-digit rate within next five years. We have invested a lot of funds in infrastructure development. For example, we are investing in the education sector for upgrading our human capital."
When the infrastructure projects will be completed within next year, we will get returns from those investments and our economic growth will automatically expand further by 2.0 percentage points, the finance minister said.
Only the Padma Bridge alone will help grow our GDP by 1.0 percentage point, the minister added.
"We have talked on Rohingya issue with the ambassadors too. They are very tough on it. They believe that the Rohingyas will return to their homeland in Rakhine state. "They will help us overcome the Rohingya crisis bringing other countries together," he said.
They have also informed him about Bangladesh's next challenges of climate change and carbon emissions.
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