Dr Akbar Ali Khan was a voracious reader.
One day, while going through one of the volumes in the compendium of laws published by the Law Ministry, he discovered something disturbing: the vibrant and much-used courier industry of Bangladesh was operating on shaky legal ground.
To put it more bluntly, it was possibly illegal.
Why? Because the Postal Act of Bangladesh, which was more than a 100 years old, gave the Post Office a monopoly on delivering letters and parcels.
No one else but it could carry out this activity.
This was about 15 years ago.
Dr Khan was then chairman of the Regulatory Reform Commission.
In that capacity, he sent a proposal to the government to amend the 1898 Postal Act to make courier services legal.
The proposal was accepted, and the law was duly amended.
The next task was to issue regulations to make the legal amendment effective.
This was done in 2013 through the issuance of the Mailing Operators and Courier Services Rules.
This is an illustration of what the Regulatory Reform Commission was supposed to do, i.e., systematically identify areas where regulatory reforms are needed, both amending or abolishing existing rules and introducing new ones.
Sadly, the commission was not allowed to function long enough to make a real dent.
But that is another story.
Underlying this small, but important, discovery by Dr Akbar Ali Khan is a story of entrepreneurship.
Bangladesh’s postal service was unable to meet the logistical demands of a growing economy.
Letters, documents, and parcels were not being delivered fast enough.
In some cases, these were not being delivered at all.
An opportunity thus existed for entrepreneurs to step in and fill in some gaps.
And some were quick to exploit that opportunity.
Several courier service companies sprung up in the private sector to compensate for the less-than-satisfactory performance of the government-owned postal service.
For a long time, no one noticed that these companies, while delivering useful service, were operating in a grey legal zone.
Even if the regulators noticed, they turned a blind eye.
It took a scholar-bureaucrat with a penchant for both reading and action to notice the anomaly and take the initiative to provide the industry a more solid legal foundation.
The emergence of courier services is just one example of the widespread unleashing of the entrepreneurial spirit in Bangladesh.
Bangladeshi entrepreneurs have shown an ability to learn fast, grabbing opportunities as swiftly as they appear, irrespective of whether these originated domestically or came from global markets.
Entrepreneurship has blossomed in both the economic and social spheres.
NGOs have not only created effective delivery mechanisms for social services, but many have become vehicles of entrepreneurial activity.
People have seen problems, thought about creative solutions, mobilized required resources, delivered the solutions, reassessed them in the light of experience, and redesigned approaches when needed.
Policy reforms
Policy reforms over the years would not have produced Bangladesh’s remarkable development story had there not been such a significant market response.
Indeed, what may set Bangladesh apart from many other developing countries is the supply response to policy actions.
Such supply responses by a variety of economic actors, such as farmers, industrial firms, and traders, in turn, generated demand for further policy actions which were often forthcoming.
Underpinning such supply response has been the entrepreneurial spirit mentioned above.
But how did this come about?
In a recent blog, economist Shanta Devarajan, a former senior official in the World Bank who now teaches development at Georgetown University in Washington DC, writes about Bangladesh’s remarkable development experience and suggests, “Bangladesh has a densely packed, relatively homogeneous population. As a result, ideas and innovations spread like wildfire.”
Devarajan is right, but only partly.
Density explains why people quickly get to know what others are doing or thinking.
It does not explain why, having learned of new ideas, Bangladeshis have been fast in adopting them.
New ideas, new products and new approaches may promise high returns.
But these can be risky too.
Why have so many Bangladeshis, from farmers to large companies, been willing to venture into new territory?
Akbar Ali Khan, who was also a historian, has provided some useful clues.
In his fascinating book Discovery of Bangladesh, Khan sought to analyze the cultural traits of Bangladeshis based on historical material.
He argued that people living on the land that now constitutes Bangladesh are by nature open to new ideas.
This has to do with the historical nature of rural settlements in Bangladesh.
In his book, Khan invokes the anthropologist’s distinction between corporatist and open village structures and lists the factors that lead to a corporatist village structure.
These include the need for public services such as irrigation, and protection against foreign invaders and wild animals.
Khan argues that one or more of these conditions were present in most parts of South Asia leading to corporatist rural settlements in these regions.
But the land that now constitutes Bangladesh was an exception to this South Asian pattern - neither of these conditions were present in the Bengal delta.
In particular, the presence of natural sources of irrigation, such as rainfall, rivers and other wetlands, precluded the need for a cooperative effort to create and maintain large irrigation networks.
This is a major reason why villages or rural settlements in Bangladesh have historically not been corporatist in nature.
Akbar Ali Khan states: “Historical evidence of the last hundred years suggests that the degree of corporateness of rural settlements in the Bengal zone was much lower than that of north and south Indian villages…. The villages in North and South India were corporate whereas those in Bengal were loosely structured. However, there was regional difference in the degree of loosely structured villages in Bengal. They tended to be less loose in the western areas and more loose in the eastern areas of Bengal.”
So, what has such a loose structure of rural settlements got to do with the rise of an entrepreneurial spirit in the land that now constitutes Bangladesh?
Khan suggests that the prevalence of such rural settlements in Bangladesh led to “robust individualism” and “enriched cultural life by letting hundred flowers of heresy, heterodoxy and esoterism blossom.”
He contends that this feature of Bangladeshis has been both a handicap and a blessing.
On the one hand, it has made it difficult to develop grass-roots institutions, or village governments, in Bangladesh.
On the other hand, this tolerance, perhaps even encouragement of “heresy, heterodoxy and esoterism” may have made Bangladeshis receptive to new ideas that carried the promise of ushering in a better life.
Combined with sheer survival instincts, a product of both poverty, and geographic and climatic vulnerability, this cultural trait also made Bangladeshis willing to take the risk of trying out new ideas.
In brief, a mix of density, a cultural tolerance of heterodoxy and a survival instinct may have helped unleash the entrepreneurial spirit that we now observe in Bangladesh.
A decade and a half ago, Akbar Ali Khan discovered a small but important legal anomaly that could have jeopardized the future growth of Bangladesh’s courier services.
But long before that, during the war of liberation in which he was a direct participant, Akbar Ali Khan had started dreaming of a profound journey of discovery.
In writing the sub-title of his Discovery of Bangladesh, Khan eloquently summarized the objective of that journey.
He called it “Explorations into the Dynamics of a Hidden Nation.”
This is a journey that did not end with the publication of the Discovery of Bangladesh in 1996.
Indeed, for much of his life, the work of Akbar Ali Khan, the voracious reader, the dedicated scholar, the relentless writer, and the courageous public intellectual, has been a journey of discovery.
With a generosity of spirit, the boldness of a principled man, and the power of his pen, Akbar Ali Khan has shared with us the fruits of that journey.
By doing so, he has encouraged us to embark on our own voyages of discovery, our own explorations into the dynamics of a hidden nation.
The author is an economist, previously with an international development agency