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The committee formed by the interim government to prepare a white paper on Bangladesh economy has reportedly found evidences of fraudulent practices and widespread manipulation of official data by the ousted fascist regime. It only reinforces the long-held view of the economists and social scientists both inside and outside the country that the leadership of the deposed regime actively resorted to politicisation of statistics over a 15-year period starting from its assumption of office in January 2009. The national agency tasked with the job of preparing official data -- Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) under the Ministry of Planning -- was at the helm of such deceitful efforts. The officials were made to doctor and manipulate data at the instruction of political high-ups, who were bent on presenting a rosy picture of the economy and advancing their official narrative of development.
The main areas of these manipulations centred on Gross Domestic Product (GDP), per capita income, and inflation rate. It has been revealed that data pertaining to these variables and indicators were not released without the approval of the head of government; and when she was away on long overseas trips, the reports were held up until she returned. As the figures reflected the preferences of the then regime, there were often notable differences with the assessments of development partners like the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), and Asian Development Bank (ADB).
It has been disclosed by some BBS officials that they initially submitted the prepared statistical reports to the then planning minister. The minister then instructed them to change the figures to reflect his whims and fancies. After that, when the concocted figures were to his liking, he would send those to the prime minister for approval. Sometimes, orders for making changes were issued even by the autocrat herself, which ultimately did not reflect the reality. Because of these malpractices, the relevant stakeholders did not trust the BBS figures, although they were compelled to use those as official data. Finally, the policies framed on the basis of those skewed or twisted figures were also bound to go awry and yield wrong outcomes.
Apart from its own surveys, BBS also has to rely on data sent by various ministries, divisions, and agencies for statistics related to their respective jurisdictions. In fact, about 70 to 80 per cent data fall under this category. For example, figures related to tax collection came from the National Board of Revenue, whereas the export figures were sourced from the Export Promotion Bureau. But these were also frequently doctored even before sending to BBS - as per instructions of the political bosses.
Insiders also revealed that the per capita income shown by the ousted regime was at least US$500 higher than the actual figure. Consequently, the figure should have been US$ 2,284 instead of US$2,784 claimed by the government during 2023-24. This inflated figure was arrived at by artificially inflating the size and growth rate of GDP as well as by reducing the size of the country's population. The 2022 census figures for the latter actually fell short by 8 million compared to the estimated population, and even own estimates of BBS two years earlier were higher.
If we look back, we find that the provisional GDP figures for 2019-20 showed a growth of 5.24 per cent amid the Covid-19 pandemic. The whole country was under lockdown (general holiday) from 26 March to 30 May 2020, and only the garments factories in the manufacturing sector were opened in June. Besides, the hotels and restaurants, construction, and transport sectors mostly remained closed during the March-June quarter. But instead of showing a negative growth, the manufacturing, construction, hotels and restaurants, transport, storage & communication sectors (accounting for 44 per cent of GDP) were shown by BBS to have recorded amazing growth rates of 5.48 per cent, 9.06 per cent, 6.46 per cent, and 6.19 per cent respectively. These figures also contradicted significant declines in two other indicators, viz. exports and revenue collection, which were usually positively correlated to GDP. Besides, BBS itself claimed that there had been 82 per cent fall in manufacturing output during April 2020, which was most probably true for May as well because of the lockdown.
Similar trends were also observed in case of reports related to inflation. It was an open secret that those at the helm of the Awami regime did not approve reports when the inflation rate approached or crossed 10 per cent. As a result, the actual rates of inflation had always been higher than the official ones. The last inflation figure released by the Hasina regime for June 2024 was 9.72 per cent. Then the figures for July released by the interim government that assumed office in August was found to be 11.66 per cent. The official inflation rate was subsequently found to be 10.49 per cent in August, 9.92 per cent in September, and 10.87 per cent in October.
The country's leading economists have all along raised questions about the authenticity of statistics provisionally announced by BBS, even claiming that growth rate figures assumed the shape of political numbers. A kind of infatuation appeared to have grown among policy-makers of the fascist regime regarding growth, as growth data were used politically. But exaggerating growth could not be beneficial, as it did not help policy-making. Even an ex-secretary of the statistics division claimed at a dialogue in 2019 that she had seen how development-related statistics were polished or doctored during her tenure. The problem became even more acute when the mafia-like regime tried to paint a rosy picture of the economy in an attempt to hide democratic deficits.
This lack of credibility of the country's statistical apparatus needs to be addressed swiftly. There should be a transparent dialogue on the subject by involving all stakeholders for streamlining the statistical system. The BBS should be made a fully autonomous organization free from political supervision in order to prevent doctoring of statistical figures, as was practiced previously. Besides, the methodology followed by BBS should also be modernised in order to make the data more credible and authentic for subsequent usage in policy-making.