Commerce Adviser Sheikh Bashir Uddin today said he had to pay a bribe of Tk 20 crore to the road authorities for digging up a road to lay the 40km gas pipeline for his industry during the previous Awami League regime.

"I had to stand in the rain in front of the residence of the former state minister for power, energy and mineral resources [Nasrul Hamid] to get a gas connection to my industry with my own expenses," said Bashir, the managing director of AkijBashir Group, which has concerns in ceramics, glass, steel and polymers.

"That will not happen now. It's an opportunity for you [the business leaders]. Come to us with business proposals and solutions and not just problems -- we will sort those out unitedly," he said at a discussion titled "Ways of Mitigating Energy Crisis in the Industrial Sectors" organised by the Bangladesh Chamber of Industries (BCI).

He said the energy sector was one of the pillars of criminalisation of the previous government.

Top business leaders at the discussion said insufficient gas and power supply, increased fuel prices and inflation have escalated production costs in Bangladesh, making doing business here harder.

In the first nine months of the year, about 200 factories have shut their operations and another 300 factories are on the way to shutting shop within the next year, said BCI President Anwar-Ul-Alam Chowdhury.

Chowdhury went on to blame the foreign currency devaluation, liquidity crisis in the banking sector, lower imports of liquified natural gas, restrictions on the opening of letters of credit and a lack of good governance in the National Board of Revenue for the situation.

The industries' demand for gas is about 1,040 million cubic feet a day (mmcfd) while they are getting around 500 mmcfd, said Ijaz Hossain, former dean of engineering at Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET), in his keynote paper.

"It is very alarming that energy consumption has not increased in the last two years."

Due to the expansion of the power grid, energy consumption in the domestic sector has increased, which implies the industrial sector has shrunk, he said.