Whither the biggest election time commitment ?

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The proverbial gap between the cup and the lip is so apparent in the context of Bangladesh. The ruling party's top figures including the Prime Minister, used to be noted so frequently for taking the vow that price reduction or normalization would be their highest priority on going to power. People were assured by the pledging and responded by giving the present ruling alliance a massive mandate to sail so smoothly to power. Even after the election results were known, there was found no decline in the torrents of promises from the ruling party that effective and extensive downswing of prices would follow very soon.
But well after a year of taking power, the signs are simply not there that efforts on the part of the victorious alliance has led to ample downslide in the prices of essential goods to their reasonable or rational levels. Price decreases of some goods in daily use there have been in this period. But the same was an automatic process with no relationship to any governmental urging or directive for this to happen. Prices of imported kitchen commodities like cooking oil have been going down even before the election and under the caretaker government. This was the outcome of the phenomenon of price depression or de-escalation for many commodities in the international markets. The advisers of the caretaker government were on record for saying that prices of these goods in daily use would further drop in the near future even though they would not be in power at that time.
But the all important question after more than a year since the takeover by the present government is whether they could score any major sustainable success in getting essential goods to be sold and similar services to be discharged at prices and charges respectively that the consumers can accept as reasonable. Or it can be put like this : is the government playing a role to oblige the distributors of imported essential products or dispenser of indispensable services to sell their products or services at what should be their true value ? Any honest answer to this must be in the negative.

Nazimuddin Ahmed
Khilgaon Chowdurypara, Dhaka