Road rollers do not require secretaries to operate them. Yet five officials including the Chattogram City Corporation Secretary and the Private Secretary to the Minister for Local Government, Rural Development and Cooperatives are, reportedly, scheduled to spend ten days in Sweden learning precisely that skill. These are the same double-drum road rollers delivered to Chattogram six months ago, machines whose original contract required only a single day of on-site training for sub-assistant engineers and actual operators. The Private Secretary among them serves the very minister whose ministry oversees this contract, leaving it unclear how a proposal so difficult to justify secured ministerial approval in the first place. Training is ordinarily conducted when machinery arrives, not half a year later when the equipment has presumably already been in regular use. Thus, the overseas trip not only defies logical reasoning but also directly violates the agreed upon procurement terms.
Their trip is being paid for in full by the contractor who supplied the rollers, covering airfare, lodging and daily allowances. This actually makes the matter worse. Nothing provided by a contractor is ever free. Businesses recover costs through the contracts they execute, meaning the price will eventually land on the public one way or another. That is why procurement laws across the world place strict limits on gifts, hospitality and benefits offered by contractors to public officials. The Swedish trip may look like the contractor's expense, but it will almost certainly find its way back into the contract value, leaving taxpayers to finance what is really a luxury excursion for bureaucrats and political aides. There is also the matter of conflict of interest. An official who enjoyed a contractor's generosity is not well placed to scrutinise that same contractor's work later. Public procurement depends not only on fairness but also on the appearance of fairness. Once that appearance disappears, every decision becomes open to doubt. Whether contract prices were inflated to accommodate travel costs and whether quality inspections will remain rigorous are questions that now deserve answer.
Unfortunately, foreign training programmes of this kind have become a recurring feature of the established administrative culture. Every year people witness officials travelling abroad to study mosquito control, school meal programmes, canal excavation, drainage management, fish farming or other activities that could often be demonstrated locally or taught through online platforms. The usual excuse for these trips such as learning global best practices falls flat when matched against local realities. Looking at portable toilet maintenance in China or studying canal excavation in the Netherlands does nothing to fix domestic hygiene or excavation problems, especially when the realities on the ground are completely different. In a digital world where technical guidance can easily be accessed online or provided by bringing an expert at a fraction of the cost, insistence on flying across the world to operate an already-in-use machine reveals that personal pleasure is being placed far above the public interest. Little wonder, then, that civil society figures describe such visits as paid holidays disguised as capacity building used for shopping, visiting relatives or simple relaxation rather than skill transfer.
Public outrage occasionally forces the cancellation of the most controversial trips, but that does little to change the culture that produces them. Approval processes for foreign training should clearly distinguish between officials who will apply a skill directly and those whose presence serves no purpose beyond institutional convenience or personal privilege. Until the state demonstrates the political will to end this abuse of official discretion, foreign training trips will remain what they have long been, a mechanism for converting public office into private privilege while the nation foots the bill.