THE Bureau of Statistics has come to be criticised and its calculation of nationally, and internationally, important figures questioned for years during the 15 years of the authoritarian regime of the Awami League, overthrown on August 5 through a student-mass uprising, for the manipulation of data that has been nothing short of deceit. The situation reached such a pass during the second and the third tenure of the Awami League that well-meaning experts 鈥� economists and academicians 鈥� started questioning almost every figure that the national statistical office came up with. Figures of inflation, gross domestic product, per capita income and, even, population census, are among the examples. The World Bank in a report, Country Economic Memorandum: Change of Fabric that was disclosed in September 2022, elaborated on the doubtful calculation of the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics, noting that the economic growth was reasonably well until the 2010s and an unexplained growth of 3.7 percentage points in 2015鈥�2019 was, rather, unusual. This is said primarily to be the result of the toppled Awami League government鈥檚 obsession about growth to deliberately lay the foundation for a development narrative, without taking into account other factors that the government should have considered.
The planning minister of the Awami League government, Mustafa Kamal, is blamed for all this. He is reported to have introduced a quarterly release of inflation data, in place of the traditional and the best international practice of a monthly update, in July 2017. The former minister is said to have decided on a quarterly update, instead of a monthly release, on the excuse that monthly updates could be inaccurate whilst economists believe that he had so done to get time to manipulate data to paint a rosy picture, which ultimately came to harm the calculation of any national figures that are important for planning. The former minister, in hiding after the August 5 event, is also reported to have instructed the statistical office people not to heed economists and academicians. The officials at the Bureau of Statistics who were opposed to such unethical, criminal data manipulation are reported to have faced harassment and departmental action. A member on the committee that is working to identify the misdeeds done in the 15 years of the Awami League in different sectors to publish the White Paper on the State of Bangladesh Economy in two months says that the former minister had been obsessed about gross domestic product and per capita income irrespective of other indicators such as private investments, agricultural outturn and unemployment well after he had become the finance minister in 2019.
All this has questioned all the data that the national statistical office had come up with during the tenure of the Awami League. And, this has, perhaps, laid waste to all plans, made then, that had used such data. It is, therefore, imperative to rectify the data as far as possible, put in place measures to stop any tweaking with public data in future and investigate people, in areas where appropriate, for such crimes and hold them to account.
