Eight months back, a report that revealed how a contractor had used bamboo sticks instead of mild steel rods in a government building at Darshana land port came as both a shock and a surprise to many, including the policymakers.
Spot investigation, later, by the Implementation, Monitoring and Evaluation Division (IMED) found that other materials used in the construction of the building were also of very low quality. Now the parties involved in the scam are pointing fingers at each other.
The irregularities mentioned above relate to a tiny public sector project.
A vernacular daily last Sunday ran a front-page story that tells how a section of unscrupulous officials of Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) inflated abnormally the cost of preparing registers containing information about business/commercial establishments.
The BBS has fixed the cost of gathering information about an individual business organisation and printing the same in a register book at Tk.418000. The same job had cost the Bureau only Tk. 23.65 and Tk. 52.50 in 2005 and 2009 respectively.
Interestingly, the BBS, allegedly, declined a proposal from the DFID (Department for International Development) of the United Kingdom to prepare 1,000 business register books at a cost of about Tk 49 million. The DFID offered the money as grant. Instead, the Bureau is now reportedly preparing the registers at a cost of about Tk 420 million!
These are insignificant scams compared to a few others now in the making. The involvement of a British company, named, Dhaka-Paira (DP) Rail Limited in the Dhaka-Paira seaport rail line construction project could be one of them. The Bangladesh Railway (BR) last week signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the DP Rail. The latter, according to local media reports, has a paltry paid-up capital worth 100 British pounds. The company's manpower strength is of only 11 persons. Of them, 10 are directors including one British national of Bangladesh origin.
The DP Rail that was registered in London only three years back, will, among others, prepare design, arrange funds and construct railway tracks for the Dhaka-Paira project worth US$ 7.5 billion.
The first two instances are ongoing acts of plunder of public money, though relatively in small amounts. The last one, it is suspected, is designed to siphon off a substantial volume of funds since the cost of the project, according to experts' assessment, has been estimated at an abnormally high level.
It is widely believed that the plunder of public funds through the implementation of so-called development projects has been going on unabatedly. No government worth its name has ever sincerely tried to stop it, for the dishonest section of officials, ruling party men -- it is no matter which party or parties are in power -- and private businesses accrue undue benefits out of projects that are supposed to benefit the people and the country.
Following insistence on the part of multilateral donors to ensure transparency and accountability in development administration, the government has largely digitised the bidding process and established the Central Procurement Technical Unit (CPTU) to oversee the bidding process.
It is hard to say that the public procurement is fully fault-free. However, the situation is better than before on some counts. Yet, the irregularities during the execution of projects by the implementing agencies and contractors have been continuing. The parties involved do devise means to take out funds for themselves at the cost of project quality.
There is, apparently, no limit on plunder of public money by the officials and others concerned. Otherwise, how could the BBS people concerned hike the cost of one procurement order nearly nine times, artificially?
It needs to be noted here that irregularities are more in the case of procurement of goods and services through unsolicited bids. People in the executing agencies and suppliers concerned are benefited more, of course, unduly and using foul means.
It is not that financial irregularities are dominating the development project execution only. A sizeable part of the government's recurrent expenditure is also misappropriated by a section of officials and suppliers concerned and the practice is very old.
There has been virtually no opposition from any quarter to dishonest practices indulged in by a section of people, including government servants. The Anti-corruption Commission (ACC) until now has been a lame duck. Of late, the Commission under its new leadership is trying to assert. But its long hand is yet to reach the culprits manning almost all government offices and establishments.
As far as the development projects are concerned, the IMED has not been doing enough to detect irregularities. It might be facing problems such as shortage of manpower and logistics. Yet it needs to be more active to streamline the execution of development projects.
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