THE economy, badly battered by two spells of flood in the country's north, north-east, central and south-central regions, is in recession. That is a hard fact of life and the government should take this into consideration while drawing up its post-flood rehabilitation programme and operationalising the same. The overall economic situation was already worrisome before the floods, because of the multi-pronged actions by the government to streamline things in a haste in a situation where lax governance and systemic problems have led to irregularities of diverse sorts in both formal and informal sectors of the economy.
It will be well-nigh impossible for any government to bring all such irregularities by taking harsh and punitive measures against all those involved in the process thereof.
It will be a more pragmatic course of action for the administration to set the basics right by deep-seated institutional reforms to check various irregularities while declaring a general amnesty for the small or petty wrong-doers. Otherwise, the wheels of the economy, we are afraid, may come to a grinding halt.
The plea for general amnesty should not be considered as any defence of wrong-doing. Rather, all big offences leading to amassing of wealth by gross abuses of public or official positions or power, should be detected and those who were or are involved in such criminal activities should be face trial under a due process of law.
But chasing all offenders, irrespective of the nature and extent of their wrong-doings, will send the wrong-signals to the economic operators at this stage when resusciation of the national economy should be the overriding concern of the government.
Habibul Bashar
Rampura,
Dhaka.
Risks of chasing too many offenders
FE Team | Published: September 27, 2007 00:00:00 | Updated: February 01, 2018 00:00:00
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