Amidst telltale incidents of public functionaries’ amassing illegal wealth in Bangladesh, the country’s key statistics body’s plan to conduct a survey to know public perceptions about graft faced strong resistance at the first meeting of the National Advisory Council on Statistics (NACS) on Thursday.
At the meeting held at the planning commission, the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) came up with a detailed plan for conducting a questionnaire survey among a sample population to know what sorts of and how many corrupt practices the people have to endure while getting their due services from government offices.
But amidst resistance and strong reservations from some of the NACS members, the BBS failed to get any final go-ahead with its planned corruption perception survey.
BBS is the centralized official body in Bangladesh for collecting statistics on demographics, the economy, and other facts about the country and disseminating the information.
The BBS move comes at a time when both mainstream and social media are awash with news of current and former public servants’ pilling up huge wealth, beyond their known sources of income, by resorting to widespread corruption.
Planning Minister Abdus Salam, who is the ex-officio head of the 18-strong National Advisory Council on Statistics (NACS), constituted in late April this year, chaired its first meeting and said it is sensitive to talk about corruption and wondered what benefits such a survey would augur.
The minister, however, directed the authorities concerned to take initiative in releasing a publication on a monthly basis through which the overall economic picture of the country could be known at a glance.
National Board of Revenue (NBR) Chairman Abu Hena Md Rahmatul Muneem, also a member of the NACS, opposed the idea of one government office (he meant BBS) surveying corruption in other government offices. He held strong reservations about the phrasing of the planned survey and suggested BBS rather think of wanting to know from people about any “problems” they face, not “corruption,” because it’s sensitive.
Some of Muneem’s now-ex-colleagues at NBR recently came under the national spotlight with the state’s anti-graft body, the ACC, unearthing huge stashes of illegally earned properties owned by them.
Another NACS member, Director General of the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies (BIDS) Dr Binayak Sen expressed concern at the prospect of political oppositions taking advantage of such corruption perception surveys.
After the meeting was over, the BBS officials declined to say anything about the planned survey.
There was no mention of this topic in the post-meet press release issued by the Planning Ministry.
According to the press release, the meeting reviewed the progress and significant operations of BBS and the Statistics and Informatics Division in line with the current government's election manifesto, the progress of the National Strategy for the Development of Statistics-Implementation Support Project (NSDS-ISP) funded by the World Bank; progress on the Economic Census-2023 project; various reports on Population and Housing Census and related data on socio-economic and demographic surveys; transforming BBS into an international standard institution; poverty measurement as a smart initiative; and the progress on celebrating the 50th anniversary of the BBS.
The planning minister also expressed his high optimism that the Statistics and Informatics Division and the BBS would play a more effective role in the country's development plans in the future, the release adds.