The New Nation - Internet Edition

Staff Reporter

Speakers at a seminar yesterday emphasised the need for increasing allocation in the budget for the coastal people to help ensure their development.

"Budget should include allocation for employment generation scheme in the coastal area, vulnerable group feeding, allocation for infrastructure development and proper disaster management," Regulatory Reforms Commission (RRC) Chairman Dr Akbar Ali Khan told the seminar at the CIRDAP auditorium. Samannay, Community Development Centre (CODEC) and the Daily Prothom Alo jointly arranged the pre-budget seminar titled " PRSP and Next Budget: Share of the Coastal People" with Abul Momen in the chair. Samannay chairman Dr Atiur Rahman presented a keynote.

Dr Akbar Ali Khan suggested the caretaker government to consider holding dialogues with the political parties before adopting the national budget sans parliament.

He apprehended that the upcoming budget, that is to be presented to the nation without parliament in place for a second time during the present regime, would not be acceptable to the political parties if their suggestions were not taken into consideration.

" I fear that the next elected government will cancel the budget as some parties already have given such hints. Awami League presidium member Tofail Ahmed in an interview has spoken in this vein. So, I think, the Government should consider dialogues with the political parties on the budget," he said.

The prominent bureaucrat, who has also served as a top executive of the World Bank, also talked on the demerit of the donor-sponsored Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) as development policy for Bangladesh.

He observed that the present Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) is "date-expired" for which it cannot create any impact on the country's development.

"We are now working with a PRSP which expired in 2007. I don't understand why the government is following the old PRSP, as the existing PRSP is no more applied."

" You can follow a strategy paper when its hypotheses remain realistic and proved true. But most of the hypotheses done by the present PRSP proved not true. It had said country's inflation would increase not above 5 per cent by 2007. Even the mentally retarded people of Pabna Mental Hospital will not agree to such hypothesis!" Akbar Ali said.

It had also been stated in the PRSP that total investment would increase at 26 per cent, which also proved unrealistic, he observed.

" Another ridiculous matter with the PRSP is that it said that pure drinking water would be available to 100 percent people of the country by 2007. Just give a look at the city. Where we are not able to provide necessary water, PRSP has said that pure drinking water would be available to 100 percent people by 2007. So how we can expect country's development following such a PRSP?" he wondered.

Now the country needs a realistic poverty-reduction strategy paper that will judge and address country's problems considering diversity of needs, region and ecology.

"I had worked with World Bank as executive representative of Bangladesh. I found that PRSP for all the countries are more or less same. PRSP for Bangladesh and PRSP for an African country carry no difference," he said.

Even poverty-reduction strategy cannot be same for all the people of a country. " People living in the coastal areas are facing one type of problems and mainland areas are facing another type of problems. Even you will find various dissimilarities between the problems of two coastal belts --Khulna-Barisal and Noakhali-Chittagong."

"Hence PRSP will have to be formulated as per the variations of problems of the respective regions. Otherwise PRSP like the present one cannot put any positive impact on the country's total development," he said.

The former adviser also said that there should be special adequate allocation for the people of coastal districts in the upcoming budget as last year's Sidr has caused a severe loss to public life there.