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TI report not accurate

11 November 2003, 18:00 PM
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
By Fakhrul Alam, Siddeshwari, Dhaka
11 November 2003, 18:00 PM
As was revealed in the news published in local dailies, for the 3rd consecutive years Bangladesh was marked as the No. 1 corrupt country of the world by the Berlin based Transparency International (TI). But, without having assessed the merit of the of the TI report, some of the local press, intellectuals and politicians, who claim they are the only patriots, became very vocal with the issue. This proved that partisan politics had more to do with their activities than patriotism.

The TI's assessment was based on reports published within Bangladesh by various local and foreign organisations and the local media. Hence, it is clear that the report is nothing but a gimmick.

Of course there are corruption in Bangladesh. But in true sense, corruption in Bangladesh is far less compared to many countries of the world. Due to the nature of my profession, I used to travel a lot. I can confidently say that Bangladesh cannot be the No. 1 corrupt country in the world, and, I am sure that people who travel around the world would agree with me.

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The TI does not report anything about Western developed countries, who are involved in billions of dollars of underhand deals related to arms trade, implementation of big projects, etc. Some times, amount involved in a single deal is more than that of the annual budget of Bangladesh. We are also aware that many of those deals were published in international media, but bypassed TI's attention.

Hence, in my opinion, one should not give importance to such superfluous reports. Rather, let us work like real patriots to better our conditions.