Regulatory Reforms Commission (RRC) Chairman Dr Akbar Ali Khan Thursday suggested the caretaker government to consider holding dialogues with the political parties before adopting the national budget sans parliament, reports UNB.

He apprehended that the upcoming budget that is to be presented to the nation without parliament in place for a second time during the present regime would not be acceptable to the political parties if their suggestions were not taken into consideration. "

I fear that the next elected government will cancel the budget as some parties already have given such hints. Awami League presidium member Tofail Ahmed in an interview has spoken in this vein.

So, I think, the government should consider dialogues with the political parties on the budget," he said. He was talking to journalists after a seminar titled " PRSP and Next Budget: Share of the Coastal People" held at the CIRDAP auditorium in the morning.

Shamannay, Community Development Centre (CODEC) and the Daily Prothom Alo jointly arranged the pre-budget seminar. Shamannay chairman Dr Atiur Rahman presented a keynote.

The prominent bureaucrat, who has also served as a top executive of the World Bank, also talked on the demerits of the donor-sponsored Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) as development policy for Bangladesh.

He observed that the present Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) is "date-expired" for which it cannot create any impact on the country''s development.

"We are now working with a PRSP which expired in 2007. I don''t understand why the government is following the old PRSP, as the existing PRSP is no more applied."

" You can follow a strategy paper when its hypotheses remain realistic and proved true. But most of the hypotheses done by the present PRSP proved not true.

It had said country''s inflation would increase not above 5 percent by 2007. Even the mentally retarded people of Pabna Mental Hospital will not agree to such hypothesis!" Akbar Ali said.

It had also been stated in the PRSP that total investment would increase at 26 percent, which also proved unrealistic, he observed. " Another ridiculous matter with the PRSP is that it said that pure drinking water would be available to 100 percent people of the country by 2007. Just give a look at the city. Where we are not able to provide necessary water, PRSP has said that pure drinking water would be available to 100 percent people by 2007.

So how we can expect country''s development following such a PRSP?" he wondered. Now the country needs a realistic poverty-reduction strategy paper that will judge and address country''s problems considering diversity of needs, region and ecology. " I had worked with World Bank as executive representative of Bangladesh.

I found that PRSP for all the countries are more or less same. PRSP for Bangladesh and PRSP for an African country carry no difference," he said. Even poverty-reduction strategy cannot be same for all the people of a country. " People living in the coastal areas are facing one type of problems and mainland areas are facing another type of problems.

Even you will find various dissimilarities between the problems of two coastal belts-Khulna-Barisal and Noakhali-Chittagong." "Hence PRSP will have to be formulated as per the variations of problems of the respective regions.

Otherwise PRSP like the present one cannot put any positive impact on the country''s total development," he said. The former adviser also said that there should be special adequate allocation for the people of coastal districts in the upcoming budget as last year''s Sidr has caused a severe loss to public life there.

The budget should include employment scheme, projects for development of the damaged infrastructures in the coastal districts and the number of Vulnerable Group Feeding (VGF) cards must be increased to make it available for all poor people.

The former adviser of the caretaker government, now assigned to the task of preparing a re-script of country''s outworn laws, rules and regulations, also stressed the need for strengthening the local government for development of the rural areas he billed backbone of the country. "

We are in some sort of a danger with our governing system. When we talk about the global climate change, then we say that Bangladesh is too little to address the threat; again when a village needs government support to be developed, the government says the government is too big to handle such small issues. So I called upon all for working to strengthen the local government," he said.

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