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A table has been estimated to cost Tk 50,000 and each chair Tk 15,000 for a project as the government is struggling to rein in foreign trips and unusually high prices of project goods after the detection of sky-high prices of materials in the Rooppur Nuclear Power Plant project.

The Water Development Board has proposed to purchase 164 chairs and tables at Tk 23 lakh for the project to dig the Shuvadda canal in Kenariganj involving an overall cost of Tk 1,290 crore in three years, said officials.

The officials said that the project was under scrutiny since there was no feasibility study done and the cost of many project components seemed overvalued.

A table should not cost over Tk 20,000 and a chair over Tk 5,000, they commented.

Zakir Hossain Akanda, member-secretary of Agriculture, Water Resources and Rural Institutions Wing of the planning commission, said that ministries and divisions had been using block allocations to buy many materials for projects.

As there was no mandatory provision for showing the costs of materials purchased with bock-allocation money previously there were scopes for misusing funds, he said.

Now the ministries and divisions have to show the estimated costs of materials under the block allocation as per a planning commission directive in the wake of the RNPP purchase scandal.

A probe report submitted to the High Court by the housing and public works ministry in July found massive corruption in procuring pillows and other articles for furnishing the apartments for RNPP’s Russian experts.

The probe detected that Tk 113.62 crore was spent on household articles and appliances for furnishing 966 apartments for the Russian experts though their actual cost was Tk 77.22 crore.

Each pillow was shown to have been purchased for Tk 5,957 while Tk 760 was shown as the lifting charge for each item.

An electric stove was shown to have cost Tk 7,747 with the additional lifting charge of Tk 6,650.

An electric kettle cost Tk 5,313 and its lifting charge was Tk 2,945.

Besides, two other projects— one approved by and the other under review of the planning commission— showed excessive prices for purchasing LED bulbs.    

Under the Second Revised Infrastructure Project of Dhaka South City Corporation, approved by the executive committee of the National Economic Council on October 15, the city corporation showed the cost of 44,598 LED bulbs to be Tk 289 crore or the average price of each bulb to be Tk 64,801.

The unusually high price of the bulbs escalated the cost of the DSCC’s infrastructure improvement project to Tk 1,719 crore from the original Tk 1,202 crore.

In a similar project, Chattogram City Corporation proposed the installation of 20,600 LED-bulb fittings on its streets at a cost of Tk 90.40 crore under an Indian suppliers credit, meaning that each unit of the items would cost Tk 43,887 on average.

The average cost of installing each LED-lamp post at Tk 1,04,110.77 is at least 40 per cent higher than the estimated cost of Tk 64,801 for setting up each such post under DSCC’s  revised infrastructure improvement project.

According to a report run by the Times of India on January 4, 2018, the Kolkata Municipal Corporation was planning to buy 30,000 LED bulbs plus lamp posts at Rupees 80 crore.

The average cost of each LED-lamp post estimated by Kolkata Corporation was Rupees 26,666.66, which is much lower than the estimated unit cost showed by the CCC, taking the exchange rate into account. 

CCC superintendent engineer (in-charge) Jhulan Kanti Das, however, told ¶¶Òõ¾«Æ· that the estimated cost of the LED bulbs and other materials were not exorbitant.

He said that they followed the government schedules to estimate the price of different materials.

Transparency International Bangladesh executive director Iftekharuzzaman observed that unless the institutional capacity of the government agencies was improved, such corruption and wastage of public money would continue.

He noted that the ministries and divisions kept the provision of block allocations for the projects in order to be able to spend on entertainment and foreign trips, facilitated by an improper evaluation process of such projects by the planning commission.

On December 11, the ECNEC approved an upward revision of the cost of the project to build the Bangladesh chancery complex in Islamabad, being implemented since 2007.

Foreign ministry officials so far made at least three trips to Islamabad in connection with the project.

On October 22, prime minister Sheikh Hasina asked the government officials to refrain from frequent foreign trips with public money and to find alternatives to frequent revision of development project budgets.

There have been criticisms of foreign tours made by bureaucrats for gathering knowledge as pleasure trips prompting the prime minister to express disappointment at such trips twice since October.

Still project proposals with ‘unnecessary’ foreign trips are plenty, according to officials.

For example, an allocation of Tk 1.68 crore for the training of some two dozen officials in Australia, Germany and the Nederlands has been earmarked in Mujibnagar Irrigation Development Project, approved on October 10.

In January 2018, former Chittagong Port Authority chairman Rear Admiral M Khaled Iqbal reportedly went on an overseas tour to gain experience on port operation even his transfer order was issued two weeks earlier.

A Bangladesh Agricultural Extension project awaiting planning commission approval for the cultivation of coffee and cashew nuts in the Chattogram Hill Tracts shows that Tk 50 lakh would be spent on training of 10 officials in Vietnam, Chile, Brazil, Mexico and Indonesia.