Green industrial policy in Bangladesh needs enforcement, Not more language

Sixty percent. That is the estimated share of pollution in Dhaka's major rivers that comes from industrial sources, according to UNIDO. We have built an industrial success story. However, we have not built the means to manage its cost.

Bangladesh's industrial sector has grown fast over the past two decades. Export-led manufacturing and large-scale economic zones have created jobs and foreign exchange in numbers few countries can match. But that growth model is now showing its limits. Hundreds of factories each manage their own water, waste, and energy. Global buyers increasingly price in environmental performance. Trade measures tied to carbon are becoming more common. A country that continues to build industrial infrastructure the old way risks losing the very competitiveness that growth was supposed to deliver.

The alternative already has a name: Eco-Industrial Parks, or EIPs. Instead of each factory managing itself separately, companies within an EIP share infrastructure, a common wastewater treatment plant, a shared power source, and sometimes use waste from one as raw material for another. It is a well-tested model. South Korea built a national programme around it. China has certified over a hundred such parks since 2001. In Denmark, a power plant, an oil refinery, and a pharmaceutical company have shared resources for decades, in one of the most studied examples of industrial cooperation in the world.

So where does Bangladesh stand? A recent UNIDO assessment measured our key industrial policies against the international framework for EIPs and found an average alignment of just 34%. Environmental management scored 26%, and park-level governance scored 29%, the two weakest areas of all. For comparison, when UNIDO carried out the same kind of assessment across 50 industrial parks in eight other developing and transition economies, the average was 49%. Bangladesh is not simply behind the international standard. We are behind where comparable economies already stand.

It would be easy to conclude that we lack the technical know-how. We do not. Bangladeshi engineers and planners understand effluent treatment, energy efficiency, and industrial symbiosis perfectly well. The real gap is institutional. We still do not have a system in place where planning authorities, private investors, and factory owners can commit to shared environmental outcomes. Nor do we have confidence that those commitments will be enforced.

Consider the numbers. The Department of Environment has roughly 700 personnel overseeing more than 30,000 industrial units nationwide. This is not a lack of political will, but rather a structural impossibility. The responsibility for industrial development is divided between BIDA, BEZA, BEPZA, BSCIC, and the Department of Environment. There is no single agency to consolidate these responsibilities. Retrofitting an existing industrial park with basic green infrastructure costs an estimated 50 to 150 million US dollars. Less than 5% of outstanding industrial lending in the country is currently classified as green finance. Small and medium firms make up over 90% of our industrial base. Yet they have almost no access to it.

This is precisely the kind of problem that public-private partnerships were designed to solve. A well-structured PPP does not just bring in private money; it forces an honest conversation about who bears which risk. Construction risk, demand risk, and performance risk, each should sit with whichever party can actually manage them. That is the credible, enforceable arrangement our industrial parks currently lack.

None of this requires starting from scratch. Three changes would move us a long way forward. First, provisions on effluent treatment and waste management in our industrial policy should stop being framed as encouragement and become binding compliance requirements. Second, our national policy should explicitly engage with the circular economy and industrial symbiosis. These concepts are already reshaping industrial competitiveness elsewhere. They are largely absent from our own policy language. Third, and most importantly, we need a single EIP framework and national master plan applied consistently across BEZA, BEPZA, BSCIC, and Hi-Tech Park authorities, rather than each running its own rules in isolation.

Bringing these organisations together with private sector representatives to form a proposed national EIP steering committee is the right move. But a coordinating committee without the legal authority to standardise contracts and enforce risk-sharing partnerships will only lead to more meetings, not more green infrastructure.

Bangladesh's ambition is not the problem. We do not lack the right words; our policy documents are full of words like sustainable development, resource efficiency, and green industrialisation. What we lack is a way to translate these words into something that a factory manager or park authority will actually be committed to following. We cannot get there by formulating better policies. To get there, we need someone who will create and maintain an EIP framework, with proper coordination and monitoring, that will make our industries truly green. That is what will finally get us to Vision 2041.

Md Azizur Rahman is a public servant working on industrial and infrastructure policy and planning, and has completed UNIDO training on eco-industrial park planning under the Global Eco-Industrial Parks Programme. The views expressed here are personal and do not represent the position of any government agency.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and views of The Business Standard.