We need national unity for democratic reconstruction, rebuilding institutions’

The new government began from the rubble of last August. What plan are you working towards?

The goal is to fulfil the public's expectations, and that requires a plan – one drawn up well before the election, which the prime minister announced upon returning home. So, the first thing we did at the Planning Ministry was prepare a five-year strategy paper, the Strategic Framework for Reform and Development. 

It follows a three-stage strategy we call the three Rs – recovery, restoration and reconstruction – spread over one to three years. Recovery is the hardest and most challenging part, and it has to come first, so the whole economic plan is built around it. The manifesto and the 31-point charter are not mere words; the task now is to translate them into real projects and a real budget.

Within that recovery stage, where does the focus fall?

On three things. The first is human development, based on the principle that no one is left behind. Even in these difficult conditions, we have committed 5% of GDP to education and health — 2% to education and 1% to health — with further investment in housing, so that people can be developed into a skilled, capable workforce. 

The second is social protection, which has the largest allocation. We have introduced new schemes, from the family card to the farmer card, and made them universal. That is a major policy change: the party capture we used to see in social protection can no longer happen. 

The schemes are being rolled out in phases. Not everyone receives them in the first year, but everyone will in time. They are designed not only to provide relief but also to link each person, however modestly, to their own savings and small investments. In this way, they serve both as a cushion and as a means of expanding the economy.

And the third one?

Building an investment-led, productive and employment-oriented economy. 

Two inputs matter most here, and both had been turned into arenas of looting and misgovernance. One is energy and electricity, which had been pushed into heavy import dependence; the other is the financial sector, where the banks were hollowed out. Restore discipline and accountability to those two, and the environment for business and investment begins to take shape.

Alongside that, we are pursuing deregulation — making business easier, cheaper and free of harassment — along with startup incentives to bring young entrepreneurs forward, a strong emphasis on technology, and a serious commitment to the environment, so that we do not develop by destroying it. The aim is an integrated agriculture-and-industry economy with a far more diversified production base.

You have said institutions cannot be rebuilt without a change in political culture. What has to shift?

Institutions cannot be rebuilt overnight, and given the pace at which ours move, reforming them and making them dynamic is a real challenge. In the end, it is politics that decides everything. Our institutions were damaged by a particular kind of politics, so the realisation that we are now building a new settlement has to come from all sides, the government and the opposition alike. 

An election was held on 12 February; this is an elected government, and the opposition too is elected and present in parliament. Resisting a fascist government that ruled without the people's consent was one thing; opposition within a working democratic system is another, and the two cannot look the same. 

From our side, the effort is to make parliament genuinely effective — a place for discussion and debate. Different parties will hold different views, and opposition is natural; but on certain questions the matter of unity arises. 

We need a minimum national unity to carry democratic reconstruction forward and to strengthen the practice of democracy, and where we differ on policy, those differences have their rightful place.

You speak of institutional reform. What does that mean inside your own ministry?

The way we have long undertaken projects breeds delays and cost overruns, and with them a great deal of waste, quite apart from corruption. So we are changing the structure to stop the waste, reduce corruption, build accountability, and deliver projects on time and within budget.

The key step is programme-based cluster planning: instead of taking projects in isolation, we bundle them under a programme aimed at a defined target and work out which projects are genuinely complementary and needed to achieve the optimum result. To that, we are adding time-bound implementation, proper monitoring and automation.

Is there a single change that ties all of this together?

One Citizen, One Number, One Wallet. It is a very important reform, and once it is in place, a citizen's rights and duties become far clearer, and much of the disorder we live with gives way to order, because everything can be related to everything else.

It lets us do One Teacher, One Tap in education, e-Health in healthcare, a proper pathway for athletes from the grassroots up, and build a creative economy that carries culture from the village to the national stage and connects rural handicrafts and products to the mainstream economy. 

All our automation projects — Bangladesh Bank, the NBR, the Auditor General's Office, planning and statistics, and procurement — are being brought onto a single interface.

The energy crunch is what people feel most. What is the plan to ease it?

We are building a self-reliant energy policy. That means discovering and developing our gas fields faster, drilling new wells, bringing Bhola's gas in by pipeline, scaling solar up to 10,000 megawatts, increasing our storage capacity from about one and a half months to three, and putting in the LNG stations we need to import at scale.

None of this can be done at the flick of a switch; the measures under way call for a horizon of one to one-and-a-half years. In the immediate term, we are moving fast to address the boiler and fuel-oil problems affecting industry, because that is where the pain is sharpest. The extra fuel bill has already crossed Tk40,000 crore, so the fiscal pressure is real, and the government is giving this its highest priority.

A new pay scale is being introduced. How is that being managed?

It was an election commitment and a long-standing demand — there has been no pay scale for 11 years, since 2016. We are doing it in phases, so that the rest of society, the private sector included, has time to keep pace and no adverse shock hits the market.

The increases for the first, second and third years have all been planned, and you will notice that the largest rise is at the very lowest grades. It has been designed carefully, precisely so that it does not feed inflation.

Where does the money come from?

We are working to broaden the tax base and make it more efficient, while moving to automation so that no one is harassed, but people do pay their taxes—because without taxes, where would the government's money come from? And that money must then be spent accountably rather than looted.

We have also increased the size of the Annual Development Programme; raising public investment is meant to energise the economy so that private investment is encouraged. On the revenue side, the target for 2027–28 is Tk6.05 lakh crore in NBR revenue and close to Tk6.95 lakh crore in total revenue.

Rebuilding these institutions takes time — each automation project's architecture is being redesigned with our own tax and IT experts — but we expect significant progress on automation within 18 months.

So when does the investment slump lift?

Energy and the financial sector are the two decisive inputs for investment, and until confidence and comfort return there, investment will not accelerate. As the finance minister has put it plainly, the recovery period needs a cushion – a stretch of time in which things are put back in order.

I am optimistic that the present phase of the energy crisis will pass relatively soon, within that one- to one-and-a-half-year window, and that, as it does, the investment-oriented plans we have already prepared will begin to take effect.

You talk of economic democratisation. How does the political side move with it?

The two are bound together — you cannot have genuine political democracy without economic democratisation, and where economic democratisation is missing, the economy itself becomes an instrument of plunder. So they have to advance together.

On the political side, the July National Charter, signed with its notes of dissent, is being carried forward through the Constitution Amendment Committee, whose work is under way and which is consulting widely — from the families of the martyrs and the wounded to the wider public. Reform is a continuous process; it is not finished in a single day. We are on that path.

Finally, on geopolitics — India, China, the US — and the six months ahead.

The government's policy is settled: protect Bangladesh's national interest and, on that basis, build good relations with everyone. We will not sacrifice our interests for any relationship, and the policy is the same for India, China and the United States alike. But such a policy only becomes effective when there is unity among the people at home, because a united people is the first guarantee of sovereignty.

As for the months ahead, the challenge is to meet the expectations people live with day to day — on prices, law and order, and security — and, above all, to bring energy and the financial sector to a point where confidence and relief return. 

That effort is under way, and if these few indicators improve, the plans the government has already taken up will, I believe, deliver effective results quickly.