BD govt little open to people

The Government of Bangladesh is little open to people on sharing information, fostering citizen participation in decision-making and empowering them less with tools to hold it accountable.
Such observations are made in the Open Government Index, an initiative by the Washington-based World Justice Project (WJP), which put Bangladesh in 73rd place among 102 countries considered for the ratings.
The idea of indexing is to identify how the governments in different countries open to their people.
The index shows Sweden, New Zealand and Norway as the three countries where the governments are mostly open to their people. On the other hand, Uzbekistan, Myanmar and Zimbabwe have such governments which are very reluctant to allow their people to have access to any information or take part in policymaking.
The WJP index, unveiled Friday across the world, is constructed on the basis of four dimensions: publicized laws and data, right to information, civic participation, and complaint mechanisms.
"These dimensions are intended to reflect how people experience varying degrees of openness in their daily interaction with government officials," the executive summary of the report said.
The first dimension relates to the accessibility of laws and government information without the need for citizen action while the second requires citizens to take a further step by actively approaching the government for information.
Bangladesh is relatively better in these two dimensions, especially on right to information, as 78 per cent citizens received information on request and 52 per cent within a week. Of this, 90 per cent of information is good in quality, they opined.
The citizens, surveyed for the index, also opined that 83 per cent of the government information is reliable.
The third dimension-civic participation-requires citizens' request for governmental action, voicing concerns, or proposing solutions to problems that affect them.
In this connection, only 31 per cent believe that the country's civil society, political parties and media can freely express their opinion against government's policies and actions.  
The fourth dimension constitutes a minimum condition necessary to ensure that citizens have an effective remedy to protect their legal rights.
However, the related survey revealed that less than one-third of citizens believe that government's complaint mechanism works effectively.  
The WJP Open Government Index scores range between 0 and 1, with 1 indicating greatest openness.
In South Asia, the Indian government is most open (ranked 37), followed by Nepal (40) and Sri Lanka (52). Bangladesh (73) is ahead of Pakistan (83) and Afghanistan (89). Bhutan and the Maldives are left out of count on this score in the report.
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