Another needless foreign trip in the offing

There's no stopping the flock of government officials vying to go abroad in the name of "gaining technical knowledge", despite a directive banning such non-mandatory trips amid the ongoing financial crisis. Often, these all-expenses-paid trips by senior and/or well-connected officers have no real benefits for the projects arranging them. The latest case involves the mayor of the Sylhet City Corporation (SCC) along with six other officials, who are seeking to visit a factory in the US to "evaluate" the quality of 20 vehicles purchased for a waste management project. The LGRD ministry has already issued an order for the mayor to go on the trip; the remaining six still await permission.

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Trip to manage waste or waste money?

We do hope the Tk-17-crore project will be able to modernise waste management in Sylhet city, but what we cannot understand is why the mayor himself has to close shop for four days to visit another country and inspect the quality of said vehicles. Given that the chief engineer of the SCC is also lining up for the same trip, why is it necessary for the mayor to go, then? Are we to assume that the engineers appointed by the government are not suitable for the task of vehicle inspection? That's not the end of the absurdity of this trip, however. The SCC and LGRD are claiming that it is the intermediary Bangla Trac Limited that is financing this trip. But in actuality, the cost of the trip has been included in the prices offered by Bangla Trac, as per its head of group brand management.

Hence, as with any foreign trip of public officials, the cost of this trip too will be borne by the citizens. Unfortunately, we are too familiar with this disturbing trend by now. According to the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG), which audited 13 government projects implemented from FY 2017-18 to FY 2019-20 under the ministries of agriculture and fisheries and livestock, 228 officials went abroad using public funds during this time. Of them, 23 were just one year shy of their retirement age, while 73 others had nothing to do with the projects at all.

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Foreign trips are no gifts to be doled out to state officials

We must ask: whatever happened to the government's ban on unnecessary foreign trips by public officials? It was introduced to deal with the global economic crisis in the aftermath of the pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine war. But now that inflation is even worse than it was at the time of the directive, why are government officials still being allowed to embark on such expensive trips? We urge the government to strictly enforce its directives and stop such "pleasure trips" at the expense of the public when the latter are visibly struggling to cope with the sky-high prices of bare necessities.