The Indepndent
December 1, 2012
M.
Serajul Islam
An
interesting discussion in a popular TV talk show recently led me take a trip
down the memory lane. My good friend Dr. Salehuddin Ahmed, the former Governor
of Bangladesh Bank was on the show together with two Advisers of the past Caretaker
Government. They were discussing issues of centralization/
decentralization/urbanization in the context of the deaths of workers in a
garment factory in Nischintpur near Dhaka due to fire and workers/by standers in
Chittagong when a girder gave way in an under construction fly-over. Dr
Salehuddin Ahmed made a very pertinent point on these serious but neglected
issues. He said that successive governments in Bangladesh since 1971 have erred in their
focus on decentralization of government powers and urbanization that has earned Dhaka the
dubious distinction of the worst livable city of the world.
I
remembered my days as a student of Dr. Muzzaffar Ahmed Chowdhury, our Public
Administration teacher in Dhaka University in the 1960s after watching the show.
He almost had us get it by heart that decentralization was the key for sound
development, urbanization and modernization of any developing country because
that is the path that all developed countries took and was modernized
successfully. Those were the days when we were demanding transfer of power from
the centre to the provinces. The logic of what Dr. Chowdhury taught us was that
for balanced development and urbanization, authority and responsibility for development
works must be decentralized from the central government to the state/provincial
governments and from the provincial governments to the local authorities.
Dr.
Chowdhury did not teach us anything new. He taught an accepted theory of development and modernization. This is
also what Dr. Salehuddin Ahmed said in the talk show; that Bangladesh has
followed quite a different and wrong path for its development; urbanization and
decentralization. Where the need for the development sectors was decentralization
through a transfer of power from Dhaka to the local governments, all
governments since 1971 have worked to make Dhaka stronger. They chose to make
Dhaka stronger leaving the local governments weak and powerless. Sadly, our
political leadership failed to apply in case of independent Bangladesh what
they had demanded from Pakistan, namely decentralization of the powers of the
central government that was a major demand upon which Bangladesh’s claim for
independence was based.
In
fact, it was the military dictatorship of President Hussein Mohammed Ershad that
made the only sincere effort for decentralization with the Local Government Act
or the Upazilla System. He wanted to make the Upazillas the focus of
development of the country. As soon as the country reverted to democracy, local
government was the first casualty. Despite lip service from the elected
governments, the Centre or Dhaka continued to grow from strength to strength.
It is not just in the executive branch of the government that Dhaka has gone
from strength to strength; in the elected branch of the government too, it is
Dhaka that has become all powerful. The elected officials representing the
national parliament have seen to it that elected officials at the local level
have little to no power at all so that they could directly interfere and
dominate the power structure at the local level as well.
It
is now payback time for the failure of the past governments with
decentralization of the powers of the government. A look at Dhaka is enough to
see the massive mistakes they have made. As a consequence of concentration of
all governmental powers in Dhaka, the city has become the magnet where people
are drawn to it because every aspect of their lives, or almost every, are
controlled in some government office in Dhaka. Despite all the tall talks by
those in government about economic development of the country, whatever number
of good schools, colleges and universities, hospitals, etc, there are in the
country are all largely located in Dhaka thus providing no incentive to people
with means to move out from Dhaka and live in the other cities of the country
and the district towns. New divisions have been created to decentralize powers
and take pressure away from Dhaka but these have failed to draw power and
people away from Dhaka because whatever decentralization of power has been done
has been done mainly on paper.. Like bees to the hives, people have been
attracted to Dhaka with mindless and senseless encouragement from the
government.
I
worked in the Motijheel C/A in a private bank for three years. Officers of the
bank living in Uttara were taking up to 3 hours to reach office! I wondered
that if the government had built proper a 4 to 6 lane road connecting Dhaka to
Comilla for example, it would have sent a lot of people working in Motijheel to
this once beautiful district town which with such road connection would have
been less than an hour from Motijheel. Likewise, developing the district and
sub divisional towns in the radius of 50 miles from Dhaka and connecting these
with Dhaka with again proper roads/train/water ways would have developed these
towns as satellites of Dhaka without burdening Dhaka’s absurdly poor
infrastructure. Instead to encourage the greed of the developers with which the
authorities have an evil nexus, the government has allowed low lying and
ecologically critical areas around Dhaka to be developed for residential
purposes. These so-called residential townships are using and those coming up will use Dhaka’s
infra structure and help Dhaka sink into oblivion even faster!!
This
brings me back to the talk show that led me to write this piece. Two of the
guests of the talk show were former Advisers. They were in power for two years.
While they were in power, they had no opposition. If they wanted, they could
have set many things related to our development back on track. There was for
them a proposal ready for construction of Dhaka-Chittagong four lane highway.
In fact, the proposal for this critically needed infrastructure project just
needed a nod of the government but was allowed to “pick dust” instead to use a
phrase used one of the Adviser on the show while criticizing past governments.
That road has still not been built 6 years down the road. Meanwhile, the costs
have escalated many times. In 40 years, we have not yet been able to connect
Dhaka-Chittagong with a modern highway that is resulting in un-necessary deaths
everyday because it is used by cars/trucks/buses together with the manual modes
of traffic and in many places as a market place making it a death trap and not
by any means a highway! The failure to
construct a modern Dhaka-Chittagong highway is indeed a national shame.
If
greed is used an index to describe a
country, Bangladesh would easily earn yet another “feather” in its cap. Dhaka’s
plight is the outcome of the nexus of greed that exists between the government
and people with money. If Dhaka had not been allowed to become the sole magnet
for the country and decentralization of powers from Dhaka to the local governments
had been the strategy, how would a plot of land on Gulshan Avenue that was worth
not even a few lakh Takas after our independence would now be worth Taka 200
crores and more? No sane government anywhere in the world would allow any of
these tall structures on the Gulshan Avenue that has shot up land prices to
astronomical limits simply because the infrastructure cannot support even
single storied buildings on the Avenue. This is why during day time; it takes
over an hour to travel from one end of the avenue to the other. In normal
traffic, the distance should be covered in 5 to 10 minutes!
It
is perhaps already late to save Dhaka because we have missed the
decentralization bus decades ago and with that the opportunity of balanced
urbanization and modernization. The sad part is the government is still
blissfully ignorant of it all and concentrating more powers in Dhaka to lead to
its destruction faster.
The
writer is a retired career Ambassador
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