National service programme fails to benefit youths for corruption: TIB

The National Service Programme of the government could hardly benefit the targeted youth population of the country due to rampant corruption, irregularities, anomalies and lack of visionary objective, a TIB report said Saturday.
In a report, Transparency International Bangladesh (TIB) also said there would be risks to continue the existing one or undertake any new programme due to the failure in the implementation of this programme. TIB stressed the need for visionary planning of this kind of programme with objective to develop skilled, efficient, responsible and self-employed citizens of the country.
"If any programme is undertaken without considering the socio-economic impact, it will bring rather bad result than anything good to people. Failure of this programme may leave negative impact on people," said TIB chairman Sultana Kamal.  
She said there were problems like financial irregularities, lack of monitoring, supervision and sincerity in the project.
"That's why the project failed to make any impact on people's mind as it was expected," said Ms Kamal.
TIB arranged the programme to share its latest research report titled "National Service Programme: Problems of Good Governance and Way Forward" at the Brac Centre Inn in the city.
Launched in 2009-2010 fiscal under Youth and Sports Ministry, the National Service Programme was undertaken to create temporary employment of 1988 unemployed youth aged 18-35 years having higher secondary level education or above. The government spent more than Tk 8.16 billion for piloting the project in three districts during 2009-13 period.  
But TIB study found a total of 56,054 beneficiaries in three districts-Kurigram, Barguna, and Gopalganj-against 1988. The second phase of the project was launched in February this year, to be implemented in seven districts of Rangpur division. Although Gopalganj was not included in the concept note of the piloting programme, the district was later included on political consideration.    
TIB conducted the survey on this important and innovative government initiative centring the youth population between April-September period this year from 11 upazilas where pilot project was being implemented. TIB showed the unemployed youth aged 15 years above as 2.6 million in 2010 (4.5 per cent) up from 2.1 million (4.3 per cent) in 2007.
The study found irregularities in beneficiary selection process, illegal exchange of money-either forcefully or willingly, appointment of trainers, distribution of daily allowance, favouritism, undue influence by the political and other quarters in selection and placement process, misguiding youths by accepting new applications for further extension, to make the beneficiaries work in private cooperatives, among others.
Besides, there were limitations in the programme itself for which many unqualified participants entered the programme and several members of a same family took advantage of the programme.
Sultana Kamal said any kind of favouritism, exerting influence and taking advantage from these sort of projects is a major crime. It will widen the scope of corruption and take the level of corruption at such a height when no one will ask for remedy.        
TIB executive director Iftekharuzzaman said the risk factors of implementing this kind of project were not considered in this case which created opportunity of corruption.
"There is a trend in our country of stopping many good programmes on political ground. In this project, we should see how much political or implementation weakness factor work in taking this project to next phase," he added.
TIB leaders termed the project positive which will be helpful for the educated unemployed youths if it is implemented properly. As it is a short-term project, the next phase for the beneficiaries of this project must be taken into consideration, they added.