Misuse of public money and trust

When foreign education, especially doctoral and post-doctoral degrees are considered superior to those homegrown, there is nothing to be surprised about if training – short and long – is also given the highest priority. The Roads and Highways Department (RHD) cannot be blamed for showing an overly keen interest in sending in-service engineers to receive training on widening roads, in this case a 35-kilometre road in Dinajpur town area. Pray, is it for the first time that engineers in the country are going to widen roads and streets in an urban context? Of the Tk13.24 billion earmarked for the project, Tk5.0 million has been set aside for its engineers' training on road widening. Also Tk 5.74 million will be made available for tree plantation. But the proposed heads of expenditure does not end here as an amount of Tk0.5 million will go to meet the expenditure on tender evaluation, monitoring of the project and other related works by civil servants.

The number of engineers to be sent abroad for training or its duration is not known. But about one thing there is no doubt that the project developers have been willing to show their generosity as much as they could. So generous that tree plantation on a mere 35-kilometre stretch of road, as the FE report shows, will cost a fabulous sum of Tk 3.74 million. Under the review of the Planning Commission, even the proposed Tk13.24 billion should be critically examined before the approval authority endorses it for its follow-up action. When the RHD tries to justify engineers' training abroad by citing the reason that the widening of road will take place in a town setting and it has to be completed within the schedule, the tenuous logic behind the argument gets exposed. Anyone can smell rat in the whole exercise.

Indeed, public works in this country are more like a beehive from which honey gets extracted by others including humans and bears both of which have an extraordinary fondness for the earthly nectar, depriving the industrious insects that collect it. People directly associated with execution of public works projects, more often than not, take undue advantage in order to serve their own interests. This is why even a large contingent of university teachers go abroad for inspection of lifts abroad, which were supposed to be procured for newly built student dormitories. This is why the official squad is larger in size than the teams sent to different international sporting meets. The list is long and more surprisingly when dollar crisis has forced the government to curtail its officials' visit abroad, some quarters fabricate irrelevant issues as an excuse for foreign tours.

The case of RHD engineers' proposed training on road widening is yet another addition to the long list of misuse of both public money and trust. People are not imbeciles, they critically observe how government officials and employees conduct themselves. That they are not well-served by public servants is a grievance they resent. Had they any means to redressing the corrupt official regime, they would surely go for it. The government has enhanced the salary structure for its officials and employees largely to a decent level but the people are yet to derive any benefit from it. It is time insincere and corrupt members of the government staff everywhere were made accountable for their lack of integrity.