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Over 200 trips for 'pleasure'

Rajuk sends teams abroad in last 4 years in the name of urbanisation study; Dhaka gets no benefit of their 'knowledge'

Tawfique Au
While the planned urbanisation of the capital remains in absolute disarray, the Rajuk has arranged some two hundred pleasure trips abroad for its officials since 2010 in the name of urbanisation study tour.
The tours have cost around Tk 10 crore of public money but yielded no visible result. On the contrary, Dhaka has been ranked the worst liveable city in the world every year since 2010.
Four teams, each comprising ten officials on average and mostly including bureaucrats serving on deputation at Rajuk, go to Europe, America or Asian countries annually under the scheme.
Each team visits four cities in two countries in a ten-day period.
The bureaucrats sent regularly on such tours include joint secretaries and deputy
secretaries from the housing ministry and finance division though they have hardly anything to do with town planning.
Rajuk board members, directors of finance and audit, deputy directors of accounts and estate, eight zonal directors, and three executive magistrates also get the privilege, said its administrative officials.
Joint secretaries, deputy secretaries and PWD engineers on deputation hold nearly 35 key Rajuk positions, including the posts of five board members, four directors, five zonal directors, three deputy directors, three executive magistrates, one chief engineer, five superintending engineers and six authorised officers.
The "town planning knowledge" of the officials on deputation is hardly of any use, as they leave Rajuk after a short stint, said a Rajuk official, who went thrice on such tours.
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"It is a mere pleasure trip," said an official, who went to Sri Lanka and India this year, requesting anonymity, "It is a wasteful expenditure for a purposeless tour."
Sheikh Abdul Mannan, a Rajuk board member and one of a sevenmember committee to select the officials for the tour, could not cite an example in which the "foreign knowledge" has been replicated.
"The foreign knowledge is however useful for our daily office functions," he added.
As to taking the ministry officials on the trips, Mannan said, "They will not approve the tours nor would clear our development schemes unless we let them see what our programmes are."
Officials' list for the tour prepared by the selection committee is placed at the Rajuk board and then to the housing ministry for approval, he said. It will require the prime minister's consent if the team includes a minister, a secretary, an additional secretary or an agency chief who is not below the rank of an additional secretary.
A ten-member fifth team of this year led by Public Works Secretary Md Golam Rabbani and including Rajuk chairman GM Jainal Abedin Bhuiyan, is awaiting departure for Germany and the United Kingdom on September 11.
Bhabesh Chandra Podder, who is on deputation as Rajuk board member and chief of the selection committee, said, "The selection process is not done democratically; you know the reality in our country...we have to accommodate requests for certain officials and some people enj oy undue favour."
Eva Nahar, a director and member of the committee, echoed the same.
The parliamentary standing committee on housing ministry discussed the issue at an August 26 meeting. The committee's chairman, Md Dabirul Islam, told The Daily Star, "The trips primarily meant for pleasure shopping and have been of no use to the general public, whose money is spent for this."
"We reprimanded the relevant authorities for such waste of public money and asked to stop such practice," he said. "We have no executive power to do anything else."