Speakers and municipality mayors participating in a pre-budget dialogue on Monday called for increasing municipal budget and provision of staff salary and benefit from the revenue component of the budget.
They said that boosting economic development, undertaking effective strategy to achieve universal growth and ensuring increased public investment remained as major challenges as the country strove towards becoming a middle income economy.
Brac, Municipal Association of Bangladesh (MAB) and Power and Participation Research Centre (PPRC) arranged the event at Brac Centre in the capital.
MA Mannan, minister of planning, was present as chief guest. Md Shah Kamal, senior secretary of the disaster management and relief ministry, was also present at the event chaired by Asif Saleh, acting executive director of BRAC and moderated by PPRC executive chairman Dr Hossain Zillur Rahman.
Planning Minister MA Mannan said: "The present government has undertaken a number of projects to provide housing for the urban poor, which include construction of multi-storey buildings, allocation of land and housing loans."
He also said that several development projects including 'Dhaka environmentally sustainable water supply project', urban infrastructure development projects to build and maintain streets, footpaths, drainage systems, and projects to increase resilience of buildings against disasters, were going on. There will be adequate allocation in the national budget of 2019-20 to complete these projects.
MAB joint general secretary and Madaripur municipality mayor Khalid Hossain made the keynote presentation on the challenges and future of pro-poor urban development of Bangladesh.
It mentioned that to provide different services to over 2.16 crore dwellers of 327 municipalities across Bangladesh there were only 43 thousand permanent and 22 thousand temporary employees.
Local government expert Dr Tofail Ahmed said: ‘A general increase in the budget will not solve the problem. The wave of urbanisation has now hit the villages and is shrinking them. So we have to revisit our current development strategy.
“Here in Bangladesh, any development work is done in a sluggish way, so a general talk about pro-poor development will not bring much fruit.” he said.
MAB chairman and Bera municipality mayor Md Abdul Baten said: "We are crucially trying to put our limited resources to the very best use. But even then we cannot cope. How is it possible to operate when the local government does not even have 2% share of the national budget?"
Brac's acting executive director Asif Saleh said: "Public-private partnership initiatives can be undertaken to finance the housing for the urban poor people. Also, we should give special attention to tackling the increasing pressure of rural migrants on the urban space and fire hazards."
Director of International Centre for Climate Change and Development Dr Saleemul Huq and Brac Urban Development Programme's head Hasina Mushrofa gave expert opinions among others at the dialogue.