Put Your Money Where Your Pen Is

One of the banes of Bangladesh's development is the sheer disregard with which government officials go about conducting their business. One of the most recent examples of this is the Mouchak-Malibagh flyover, a project of the Local Government Engineering Department. Apparently, using the age old model of copy-pasting other people's ideas without analysis, the LGED made the whole flyover for left-hand driven cars, something that doesn't exist in Bangladesh. While one can claim they did this so as to ensure the least amount of cars use the flyovers and hence they can then pretend that they solved the traffic problem, the reality is the error will cause immeasurable suffering and has resulted in the project cost going up 57.8% from 772 crore BDT to 1219 crore BDT. Of this amount, the government is ready to bear 242 crore BDT while the rest will come from donors. The question is, why don't the donors ever say anything? And when the donors do express a problem, what can you possibly do?

Usually, school-going children, after having stood in the sun for 6 hours to greet some low-ranking, high-browed minister, can be further bullied to stop using their tiffin money for food and instead give it to building some bridge or some road. This is of course a slow process as the stupid kids hardly get enough tiffin money to afford a sandwich at the place our public officials dine let alone build a damn bridge. The next best option is of course to extract money from the people. You may say “duh, taxes”, but let's be honest; everyone knows that only 1% of the Bangladeshi population pay taxes. This statement, so often thrown around, though fails to take into consideration the amount of indirect taxes that Bangladeshis pay as consumers or the bank deposits they make, which too are taxed by the government. It can be further highlighted that Pakistan too has figures of 1% of the population paying tax and India is relatively better with 3%. The budget every year also does not take into account the inevitable delays which increase costs in line with inflation. When donors back out due to so many hassles, it is time to recoup some of the money. And when bullying kids don't work, it is time to turn to adults or more aptly an adult who refuses to paper over the dubious cracks the government is hell-bent on littering around. Enter the editor of a newspaper.

A renowned editor has currently come under flak for telling the truth. Everyone and their grandmothers know that editors and journalists as a whole should not be telling the truth. The nature of truth is that they generally tend to go against the party propaganda and hence need not be told. Apart from telling the truth, another vile action is of course admission of guilt. It is almost like this editor has not been paying attention to how the country is being run. Scandal at TSC? Deny it. Shot a kid out of boredom? Go to jail for it but deny it. Building collapses of its own accord? Blame others and completely deny any fault of your own. One then must wonder if the editor of a national daily has been asleep all these years to miss this crucial lesson, going as far to commit the biggest sin of all time; admission of an error. Considering the bundles of money journalists make on their bare minimum wage which leads them to afford awesome rented two-roomed apartments in the city's dodgier areas and a credit card with a limit of an entire garment worker's wage, the obvious way this editor can be brought to book is by paying a hefty fine and by hefty, we mean, enough to pay for all the projects our dedicated officials have left to go over budget. And by that, we mean all of them.

The editor in question has currently been sued for a total of BDT 132,000 crore for his Gandhi-like antics of truth telling. This money can easily be used to cover all of the rising costs associated with both the Dhaka-Chittagong and Dhaka-Mymensingh Highway expansions. Both these projects have seen an increase in costs due to, you guessed it, inexplicable delays. The Dhaka-Chittagong Highway, for example, initially came at a cost of 1655 crore BDT but now stands at 3,800 crore BDT due to a 3 year delay and the Dhaka-Mymensingh Highway, after a two year delay, will now cost 1,815 crore from 904 crore BDT. The editor, who we obviously imagine to have more wealth than the entire country, should then be more than happy to pay for not just these highways, but 700 more like them. Imagine how much Bangladesh would then grow. Imagine a day when you cruise from Dhaka to New York on The Daily Star bridge. That will be a swell day. So what are we possibly complaining about?