Please read the news below and ponder. Pakistan was the 3rd largest Aid Receiving Country of the world with $ 23.4 billion in the last decade. Why is BD, a lot poorer than Pakistan is not getting this kind of Aid?
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Because, ...
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* ... BD does not try hard enough to get Aid for Poverty Reduction Program and does not send-in big Infrastructure Building proposals like Pakistan does.
* ... there are a lot of Pakistanis working in World Bank and IMF in executive positions, who are acting favorably for Pakistan.
* ... Pakistan has always been politically manipulating and blackmailing USA on thing or other.
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Situation in World Bank and IMF is this.
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1. There are a lot of executives, who are Urdu Speaking from Pakistan and India and they are sympathetic with BD but since we hate Urdu Speaking because Beharis speak Urdu also, we never even try to talk with them in Washington.
2. We did not have any competent Urdu Speaking Ambassador or Finance Minister in last decade, who could even say, 'Hello' to these Urdu World Bank and IMF executives.
3. Bangladeshis, who have studied Economics in USA, do not try for IMF and World Bank Jobs, when Pakistani Executives in World Bank keep importing even their Non Economic degree holders and Civil Service Officers from Pakistan for Managerial Jobs and they have been getting them posted worldwide at salaries as high as $ 120,000 a year.
4. Proof of what I wrote in # 3 is, since I speak Urdu and mingle with those Pakistanis, I had been offered jobs $ 120,000 a year jobs by Pakistanis in IMF and World Bank myself a few years ago. I could not accept those jobs because I have my own business with a lot bigger prospects.
5. Only elite class of Bangladeshis has been studying English since English was banned in BD schools so, chances of people qualifying such jobs have been reduced drastically.
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Example of how Pakistanis in World Bank helped Pakistan is this.
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* World Bank had stopped granting Loans and Aid to Pakistan because of extreme kind of Punjabi Corruption like mis-appropriation of Funds, cost over-run, not completing the projects within the approved amounts and getting money for one project in Karachi, Sindh and spending that money on another project in Lahore, Punjab.
* Gen. Musharraf had permitted Sindh Government to apply for World Bank Aid and Loans directly because Central Govt. was banned or kicked out of World Bank. Sindh Govt. had picked its Coalition Partner party MQM to do this because it was party of Urdu Speaking that control Urban Sindh Votes and knew that World Bank executives are Urdu Speaking.
* The MQM leader spearheading the effort was a Dhakka-born former MQM Governor of Sindh, Dr. Farooq Sattar Memon, who also speaks Bengali fluently.
* MQM ended up getting one the biggest Loan $ 10 billion for building Water Desalination and Sewerage Treatment Plants in its stronghold, the largest city, Karachi that Pakistan had ever gotten in her history.
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PROPOSAL:
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1. BD should try to get Bangladeshis hired in World Bank and IMF.
2. BD should plan some huge Infrastructure Development Projects to decrease Land Erosion, building of Dams for Reduction of Cyclone devastation, Sewerage Treatment Plants, Bridge & Road Construction Plans, Railway Plans, Port Development Plans etc.
3. BD should hire some smart highly educated or Foreign Educated Behari or an Urdu Speaking Bangladeshi to negotiate with World Bank and IMF in order to get more Aid and Loans.
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S U Turkman, Washington.
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IMF, WB place Bangladesh in Extreme Poverty class of countries
By Anwar Iqbal | From the Newspaper
April 16, 2011 (4 days ago)
Hunger and gender parity in secondary schools are the areas where Pakistan
lagged behind in achieving its development goals.
A joint report released by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank on
Friday placed both India and Pakistan among lower-middle income countries. The
IMF Global Monitoring Report 2011 also placed both India and Pakistan in a group
which lagged behind by 10 per cent or less in meeting the millennium development
goals.
Hunger and gender parity in secondary schools are the areas where Pakistan
lagged behind in achieving its development goals.
But countries like Bangladesh (extreme poverty, hunger and maternal
mortality, Indonesia (hunger, child and maternal mortality, access to safe
drinking water, and Mali (lacking in gender parity in primary education and
access to safe drinking water are also in this category.
The IMF's classification of economies by region and income for fiscal 2011 also
placed Sri Lanka and Bhutan in the lower-middle income category while both
Afghanistan and Bangladesh were placed in the lower income categories.
The report also noted that aggregate aid flows to developing countries often
reflected geopolitical priorities and/or responses to major global events.
It is therefore not a surprise that Iraq and Afghanistan were the largest aid
recipients over the last decade, the report noted.
Pakistan received $23.4 billion of foreign aid in the last decade.
Iraq topped the list with $68.1 billion followed by Afghanistan with $35.5
billion.
The IMF also noted that Pakistan had consistently demonstrated significant
improvement in school enrolment by reducing user fees. However, few of these
programmes have been around long enough to determine whether the impact is a
short-term effect of a novel project or is more lasting, the report said.
In Pakistan, providing parents with report cards containing information about
the relative performance of children and schools in villages (including private
schools) improved student performance in public schools and lower-quality
private schools and reduced fees at higher quality private schools. Pakistan is
also placed in a category of nations that took a number of trade-liberalising
measures in 2010. More than a third of the new measures in these countries,
however, were tariff reductions. The report pointed out that two-thirds of
developing countries were on track or close to meeting key targets for tackling
extreme poverty and hunger. This year's Global Monitoring Report: Improving the
Odds of Achieving the MDGs delves into country performance and reveals a
diverse, and often hopeful, picture. For example, among developing countries
that are falling short on the Millennium Development Goals, half are close to
becoming on-track. With improved policies and faster growth, these countries can
still achieve the targets in 2015 or soon after.
According to the report, the fight against poverty is progressing well. Based on
current economic projections, the world remains on track to reduce by half the
number of people living in extreme poverty.