Political Fiasco and People’s Plight in Bangladesh

The people of Bangladesh are into the grinding machine of the major political parties of the country at the moment. We are all concerned about the way out sooner rather than later. Unfortunately, not enough hope is being foreseen by us, the common people of the country.

The source of the stalemate grew from the 15th amendment of the constitution without taking the major opposition parties into confidence. The ruling coalition couldn’t have done this given that there was enough strength of leverage on the part of the opposition. Can we conclude that a landslide in favour of one party or a like-minded group of parties is bad for democracy and the people?

There is another allegation that the recommendation of the respective Parliamentary Committee was not listened and cared to the amendment of the constitution. So there is another question of maintaining proper procedure relating to the parliamentary activities. What is the use of establishing parliamentary committees if they are not listened to!

However, taking the opposition into confidence for such matters is very important in a democracy especially when their strength is not that insignificant to be ignored. Now the common people are bearing the brunt of the opposition.

We like to vehemently condemn the way the opposition parties are protesting the government’s actions. In no way it is acceptable that they hit the vehicles and burn the people.

It seems that they are taking revenge not for scrapping the caretaker system of polls time government rather the verdicts of the International Crime’s Tribunal. It is because we never have seen such violence in any opposition protests in recent times not even in the four decades of our independence.

Now, what would be the way out from the current stalemate? One way may be giving in to the opposition demand either by scrapping the 15th amendment or least handing over the Prime Ministerial position of the polls time government to a mutually acceptable person. Otherwise, the writer of this piece doesn’t believe the situation of the political and public life would improve much.

One sided polls won’t be acceptable to the general public of the country as well as the international community. Playing the JP-Ershad card cannot give the expected outcome. It’s already a blunder. Even if JP (Ershad) goes into polls, the opposition won’t stop their violent protest and they will continue it as long as they can as it is observed.

Much of the opposition’s strength comes from Jamaat. And you cannot detach their partnership, not very soon at least when they need each other most.

We don’t know if BNP would be ready to go for polls even without their blessed partnership with Jamaat. We can’t conclude if that’s one of the main reasons for them not to accept the All Parties Polls Time Government given the situation when Jamaat is declared ineligible for the polls.

Isn’t it a good solution to get a neutral person as the polls time chief executive of the government? How about if it is the Speaker of the Parliament or any other mutually acceptable person?

We know that the government is able to do with the election no matter what. But we fear that without the participation of the main opposition parties the people of the country would not be able to be freed from the violent protests, killing, arsons and blockades and countrywide strikes. So everything good achieved so far will diminish in the long run.

Shouldn’t we do what is the best for the country and the people?

There is an important concern about the proceedings of International Crimes Tribunal. If Sheikh Hasina steps down to any mutually acceptable person, the tribunal may be stopped by him/her immediately. At least the writer of this article feels like that. And we all understand the eventuality of the tribunal proceedings if AL defeats in the upcoming election when it must need at least a few months to complete the ongoing proceedings.

The Journey of Edward Snowden

The era of cold war has gone, the war on terror has begun and residing almost in its fag end concluding the War in Iraq and withdrawing combating troops from Afghanistan. The new coin of world politics is controlling the information superhighway as it seems.

We observe the plight of Edward Snowden for revealing the US mass surveillance programme called PRISM which was built to be able to intercept each and every communication, whoever conducts it, on the internet. They also hacked into the servers of certain mobile phone operators. The internet giants based in the US gave in to the programme.

The world is watching with terror how the US is chasing the whistleblower (the US claims that he’s neither a whistleblower nor a human rights activist) to be captured while Snowden claims that he is a patriot he is not doing anything to harm his country but the US government is threatening the countries with consequences that helped his passage or offering asylum on humanitarian grounds.

His fate is uncertain being holed up in Sheremetyevo Airport, Moscow since June 23 though he has declared to apply and accept asylum status in Russia since he is not able to travel to South America from where a few countries i.e. Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua offered him asylum status.

On the last Friday, 12 July, he had a meeting with the representations from Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and Kremlin and requested them to help him travel to South America while he wanted to take asylum in Russian until his ability to travel further.

It is yet to be seen whether he’d ever be able to travel to South America and whether these few countries would be able to protect him from the possible harsh treatment of his own government.

The issue has become a source of serious diplomatic row between the US camp and its rivals.

The US is always vocal on the human rights, rule of law, democratic values and other humanitarian issues. But in the instance of revealing its surveillance programme targeting everyone on this planet including its own citizenry must be too embarrassing to accept.

The actions of its camp has gone so far to ground the Presidential aeroplane of Bolivia en route to Caracas from Moscow having a suspicion that Snowden would be on board. This kind of incident never happened in history. The US is asking everyone related to hand Snowden over to them to take legal actions for the crime of espionage, theft of government property and leaking classified documents as they say.

People around the world are watching the event with utmost interest having sympathy mostly, as I perceive, for the man who has taken so much risk on his life only as a step to create a just society as the people feel.

 
Now the question is, should we stand for the actions of Snowden and other fellows like Julian Assange and Bradley Manning? Are the actions taken by them help protecting human rights and dignity? The questions are not that hard to answer.

If that is the case, why other governments are not extending their hands to protect this gentleman? Is it because they are afraid of the superpower? Or they are also corrupt!

It seems that a War on Information has begun. Do you think that the people’s rights will prevail or the hegemonic governments would remain at the helm of things?

The victims of the surveillance programmes are the common people mostly while the governments around the world are playing politics to win over their competing parties. Who are supposed to look after the interests and protect the rights and privacy of the people? Who would be brave enough like Snowden, Assange or Manning? Is it possible for a small group of unarmed activists to win over the battle with the hegemonic mammoths?

At the moment the information superhighway and the internet is controlled mostly by the US. Is it possible for other countries or its rivals to reverse the tide? It is a long way to go. Even if its rivals succeed would they be able to uphold people’s rights and privacy?

Answers to these questions are important to ponder for the interest of the world populace.

The writer is a development consultant, writer and editor. He may be reached at masudkn@gmail.com

Corruption Practices at Carew & Co. (Bangladesh) Ltd.

It is open secret that corruption is abounding at Carew’s (Carew & Company Ltd., a public sector company of Bangladesh Sugar and Food Industries Corporation) Ware Houses. But it is overlooked by the concerned authorities ever since. There are thirteen ware houses of Carew & Co. dispersed all over the country where the demand of country spirit or liquor is high.

For a long time, it’s a common practice there to mix water twice or thrice the quantity of country spirit and deliver to the consumers cheating the licensed buyers of the country making the related staff and officials ballooning their coffers with black money creating instability and inequality in the society.

So there are multiple impacts of the corruption practice. Firstly, they are cheating the licensed buyers, secondly, they are accumulating black money or illegal money, and thirdly, it is creating instability and inequality in the society.

Since the buyers of the product have to produce appropriate license issued from the Government of Bangladesh, their right to have quality product must be ensured. It is an irony that they are buying product from a government owned company but they are getting cheated with impure product and no one to see ever since!

Then the responsible staff of both Carew & Co. and the govt. staff at the Ware Houses are accumulating lots of money through this kind of cheating the buyers. They have been able to accumulate unusual amount of wealth if you could check their amount of wealth before posted to the Ware Houses. 

There is hard competition to get posted in the attractive places of Ware Houses; Dhaka, Chittagong and Srimongol are the most attractive places that the Agents are interested to be posted. Price of these attractive postings may be as high as several lakh taka. 

The astounding amount of wealth accumulated by the relevant staff, especially the agents of the company, creating commotion in the society. It is a discouragement to the hard working people of the country you may understand. They are creating unwanted situation in the society.

For example, we like to mention an Agent of Carew & Co. posted to Khulna Ware House and resides at Kushtia town. He has built a stunning 3-storied house at the heart of the town at PTI Road on around 1 bigha land. He works in a position below an entry level officer but he ride his own car and appointed a driver for the job. He owns a Rice Mill at Poradah, near Kushtia town, and a whole sale rice shop at the Chourhash more of the town. He is in the property buying spree now and want to accumulate as much wealth as possible before retiring in 2015 cheating the licensed consumers of a public sector industry.

If you check any of the 13 agents’ background you would find the same thing that their lifestyle is not commensurate to their legal income. 

So it is urgent in the interest of the consumers and the society to initiate tight grip on the corrupt practices, especially conducted by the Agents of Carew & Co. (Bangladesh) Ltd., Darsana, Chuadanga.

IT Enabled Services Business in Bangladesh: A Comparative Study

IT Enabled Services is a money-making business if you have that talent, required infrastructure and marketing network. Bangladesh has not yet achieved anything significant from this sector even though it has sufficient talent pool and easily trainable youth while there is outrageous growth and demand for the services world-wide.

The study has been taken up to find out the potential and prospects of the industry towards contributing to the economy of Bangladesh and generating substantial employment. It necessitated learning the trend of the industry world-wide and a comparative study with other successful countries in this sector to understand the potential and prospect of IT Enabled Services industry in Bangladesh. I chose only Indian IT-ITES industry for the comparative study since India is one of the most successful countries in outsourcing IT-ITES and it has similarities with Bangladesh in respect of culture and education.

Data sources of this report are mainly secondary though data of the survey conducted by BASIS may be considered primary. The author himself was involved in conducting the survey as the Coordinator of the survey during his tenure at BASIS. Unavailability of authentic recent data was a difficulty in preparing this report. There is no separate data available on the ITES sector in Bangladesh other than found from BASIS Survey in 2009. As it was observed that even the Export Promotion Bureau of the Ministry of Commerce of Bangladesh do not keep separate data for the sector. It says that this sector is yet to receive due importance from the government.

In the first section of this paper, I have tried to describe world-wide trend of IT-ITES business. In the second and most important section, I tried to describe and analyse information regarding IT-ITES business in Bangladesh. This paper focuses on ITES but because of relevance many issues and information related to IT comes in. The data related to Bangladesh ITES industry were mostly taken from a survey conducted by Bangladesh Association of Software & Information Services (BASIS) in 2009. In the next section, I addressed the status of Indian IT-ITES industry in brief. Then I compared Bangladesh ITES industry with that of India in the next section. In the last section, I proposed a few recommendations for the improvement of the ITES sector in Bangladesh.

McKinsey, in an estimate published in 2008, says that the value of global IT and ITES is $475 billion from which less than 15% was exploited in 2007. So there is a huge market of IT-ITES industry still untapped globally. According to IDC, NASSCOM and KPMG, global market size of IT-ITES industry was US$ 1,184 billion and it will stand at US$ 3,391 billion. Gartner in its December 2011 report says that worldwide IT spending, excluding telecom services but including computing hardware, was US$ 1,823 billion and it will reach US$ 2,493 billion in 2015. And global outsourcing market reached US$ 106 billion in 2010 from US$ 51 in 2005.

According to NASSCOM-Everest, 2008 report, India secured top position in acquiring global ITES market having 37% share followed by Canada (27%) and Philippines (15%). India also gained the top position of IT services market by securing 54% of the global market share followed by Canada having 29% of the global market.

The size of Bangladesh IT-ITES market is US$ 300 million according to a recent World Bank report and about 30,000 professionals work in the industry as BASIS published in 2011. There are about 800 BASIS member companies working in IT-ITES sector while BASIS ITES Survey found 1,934 ITES companies in 10 major cities of Bangladesh. Most of the companies are very small in size. BASIS ITES Survey 2009 focused only on six segments of ITES namely, BPO, Data entry, Call centre, GDS, Multimedia & 3D, Service Bureau which are the main ITES businesses in Bangladesh until now. Though the first Bangladesh ITES company was established in 1956, the modern phenomenon of ITES industry grew in this country in the 1990s. Investment in Bangladesh ITES sector is a meager US$ 3.88 billion. Total exports revenue from IT-ITES sector of the country was US$ 56.57 million in the first ten months of FY 2011-12 while the sector earned US$ 45.31 million in FY 2010-11 from exports. (EPB) According to BASIS ITES Survey 2009, ITES sector of the country earned US$ 13.85 million from exports in FY 2008-09. It may be assumed that about 200 IT-ITES companies have exports portfolio in Bangladesh since 160 BASIS member companies export IT-ITES services mostly to North America, Europe, Australia, East Asia and the Middle East.

Major strengths of Bangladesh ITES industry are creativity, quality control and compliance while the major weaknesses of the sector are internet cost, followed by infrastructure and cost of business as the key informants of the sector believe.
Access to finance, internet, market access, human resource, quality control, infrastructure, law and order, government policy, uneven competition and political situation, are the major hindrances to ITES exports from Bangladesh identified by the industry people. Financial institutions do not have products matching the business of this sector; internet is slow and costly; industry players do not have that capability yet to enter into international market; the industry lack skilled human resources; they cannot provide quality services for whatever reasons; there is lack of sufficient infrastructure needed for the sector especially power and high bandwidth internet; existing laws of the land are not commensurate with the industry; government policies are not that favourable to the business of the sector; there is uneven competition among the players of the sector since most of them are competing for a pie from the domestic market not having the capacity to enter into international market; lastly, the image of the country as a business destination is yet to be uplifted owing to political instability.

On the other hand, Indian IT-ITES sector generated 2.5 million jobs and earned US$ 88.1 billion in FY 2011. The sector in India has been growing with a CAGR of 24% for the last ten years. It contributed 5.6% to the GDP of India in FY 2010.

According to an OECD study, annual growth of Indian IT services industry, which includes software and ITES, which had been growing at a double digit rates yearly, was slowed down to 6% in 2010 due to global recession though total revenue was increased to US$ 64 billion.

In 2009-10, Indian IT-ITES industry earned US$ 73.1 billion combining domestic and exports revenues including US$ 9.4 billion from hardware and US$ 14.7 billion from IT Enabled Services. It is noted here that hardware segment earned US$ 9 billion from domestic market and US$ 0.4 billion from exports and ITES earned US$ 2.3 billion from the domestic market and US$ 12.4 billion from exports.

It is observed that hardware sales in the domestic market of India is still higher i.e. US$ 9 billion in FY 2009-10. So it may be conferred that India has not yet reached its optimum in IT-ITES sector.

Financial Institutions, Telecom, Manufacturing and Retail industries are the principal revenue sources of Indian IT-ITES industry contributing 41%, 20%, 16% and 9% respectively to its total exports. As regards the domestic market, Financial Institutions, Telecom, Manufacturing and Retail industries are contributing 41%, 20%, 19% and 6% respectively. These top four sectors i.e. Financial Institutions, Telecom, Manufacturing and Retail contribute 86% to the total IT-ITES revenues of India considering both the exports and domestic market.

US, UK and Continental Europe are the major markets of Indian IT-ITES industry contributing 61%, 18% and 12% respectively to the export revenues of the sector.

According to a study of Evalueserve, a global specialist in knowledge processes, Indian IT-ITES industry has captured 45% of the global IT-ITES market in 2010 increased from 36% in 2003. More than 60% of the industry’s revenue comes from exports. (NASSCOM)

In 2009-10 India exported IT-ITES services to 154 countries of the world which also proves the industry’s robustness.

A NASSCOM McKinsey report forecasts that Indian IT-ITES industry exports would reach US$ 328.9 billion with a CAGR of 20.7% by 2019-20 from US$ 23.6 billion in 2005-06.

OECD, in a report published in 2009, projected that by 2020 India will be ahead of its competitors e.g. Philippines, Mexico, Israel, Ireland, Indonesia, Turkey, Brazil and Malaysia in terms of quantity and quality of people required in the IT-ITES sector though these newly emerged competitors have thrown challenges to the Indian industry.

India achieved the top position according to the assessment of A.T. Kearney’s Global Services Location Index (GSLI) in terms of its financial attractiveness, business environment, skills and people availability.

Indian IT-ITES sector has been emerged as the major driver of growth within the services industry contributing directly to its economy. A few indicators of the industry’s contribution are:
⦁ Contribution to GDP (6.4% in FY 2011)
⦁ Exports revenue (US$ 50.1 billion in 2009-10)
⦁ Projected employment of 3.7 million by 2012

The development of Indian IT-ITES sector has indirect positive impacts on its economy. Following indicators are examples of indirect contribution to the economy.
⦁ Further employment generation
⦁ Enhancing growth of other sectors of Indian economy
⦁ Balanced regional development

Indian IT-ITES industry has been able to achieve capability of performing complex and critical business processes starting from low end back office and call centre business within a decade. Huge investment of the Indian IT giants like TCS and Infosys in infrastructure development and training to build human resources was one of the important reasons behind its success story.

Major challenges faced by Indian ITES-BPO industry are infrastructure, talent shortage, data security and attrition.

As per IMD World Competitiveness Yearbook 2012, rated by IMD, a Swiss business school, India is ranked 35, down from 32 in 2011, in the club of 59 most competitive economies of the world.

The phenomenon of outsourcing has been transitioning from Outsourcing 1.0 to Outsourcing 3.0. The parameters of outsourcing are: Responsible Business Climate; Smart Philanthropy; Talent; Standards and Compliance; Supply Chains; Innovation; and Communications.

Locational attractiveness and e-readiness are wide acknowledged issues for outsourcing. A few renowned consulting firms like A.T. Kearney, Gartner, Hewitt’s International and McKinsey formulated benchmarking frameworks based on criteria like available employable skills, especially IT skills, competitive cost of business, necessary infrastructure for IT-ITES industry, and business friendly environment.

The main driver behind India’s success in the industry was huge investment by the IT giants like TCS and Infosys. They invested a lot on infrastructure and training to secure stable position in the global market. They have been able to prove their worth and became the back office of large global corporate houses. They are on track to reach the target of earning US$ 329 billion per year by 2020 according to a NASSCOM McKinsey estimate.

India has gained the number one position in the A.T. Kearney’s Global Services Location Index and achieved the 32nd position among 59 most competitive economies in the world.

Bangladesh is yet to get its foot hold in the global market of IT-ITES. Bangladesh has neither been able to secure a position in the top 40 outsourcing countries of the world rated by A.T. Kearny’s Global Service Location Index, nor one among the most competitive economies in the world measured by IMD. But the good news is Gartner for the first time included Bangladesh in top 30 off shore destinations in its December 2011 report mentioning two important weaknesses – one is infrastructure and the other is proficiency in English. Bangladesh fared worst with a rating of “poor” in the report.

It needs to put emphasis on development of infrastructure and human resource development along with other incentives as provided to other sectors. The Hi Tech Park that is under construction at Kaliakoir, Gazipur should be ready at the earliest. Community of Bangladeshi diaspora should be encouraged to invest in the local IT-ITES industry. The employees’ poor level of proficiency in English is another barrier to our IT-ITES sector. So, proper attention to acquire English as a second language by our students and employees is necessary.

Bangladesh government has formulated and adopted an ICT Policy and also declared a vision of “Digital Bangladesh” by 2021. But it lacks in terms of implementation. There is tremendous gap in FDI in IT-ITES sector of Bangladesh. The government and business associations combined should work to attract FDI to the ICT industry of the country.

Courses on different ITES segments like graphic design, CAD etc. along with English Language may be introduced in the technical training institutes. ITES industry needs skilled people but not necessarily many highly qualified employees like software companies. It is observed that due to lack of infrastructural facility and low proficiency in English Call Centre business could not make headway in Bangladesh. Collaboration between the industry and the academia is also necessary for building human resources as per industry needs.

Focus should be given to provide electricity and internet facilities to the small towns at least up to the sub-district level of the country to help spread IT-ITES industry to the length and breadth of the country and reduce youth unemployment.

Banks and financial institutions should be made understood about the nature of IT-ITES business and encouraged to offer products commensurate with the industry to meet its financing needs. Government also may try to provide incentives in procuring local services and solutions within the purview of WTO provisions.

Due importance should be given to compliance issues to make footprints in the global market. It is observed that the industry people are yet to give appropriate importance to the issue. The industry associations may initiate to make the industry people understand and realise its importance in the world market.