Sajeeb Wazed Joy slams civil society

Prime minister Sheikh Hasina’s ICT adviser Sajeeb Wazed Joy on Tuesday questioned the motive behind not “projecting the country’s development transformation” before the world by a certain quarter of the civil society and “their desperate bid to malign the country’s image”.

“Why is this quarter always seen hell-bent on painting a negative view on the country where the country has marked a significant progress in almost all the major indices, including social, infrastructure, economy and ICT?” he asked.

Joy, also the son of Sheikh Hasina, was addressing an interactive event titled ‘Policy Cafe’ at a city hotel which was attended by a select group of over 300 young entrepreneurs from different sectors ranging from ICT to dairy industry, reports UNB.

“In the last nine years, we, the Awami League-led government, brought a number of success stories-GDP growth saw a sustained increase, poverty rate went down, there was a quantum leap in ensuring social justice and equity and the ICT landscape has taken a great run,” Joy further said.

In reference to a ‘disinformation campaign’ by civil society members over creating a ‘false sense’ of alarm centring the unemployment problem, Joy said the unemployment rate in Bangladesh is very low-at mere 4.2 per cent-unlike many other developing countries and developed nations.

He also said while this rate has excluded the non-traditional employment scope, like private enterprises-Pathao, Uber-the real unemployment rate would also mark a downturn.

“Also, an overwhelming number of around 400,000 employments created due to mobile banking.”

“While France and Australia have been overburdened by the unemployment rates of 9.2 per cent and 5.5 per cent respectively, our country has made good inroads. Yet, this civil society group has been terming our success stories as jobless growth. In 2017, over 1.4 million employments have been created in the country and still it is growing,” the PM’s adviser said.

Centre for Research and Information (CRI), a non-profit research organisation, organised the event, opening up a unique scope for the leading and growing entrepreneurs to place their observations before Joy in a bid to help the latter devise the next course of policies to speed up national growth.

State minister for ICT affairs Zunaid Ahmed Palak also spoke on the occasion.