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THE report on abusing bond facilities of readymade garment industries is one example that is enough to assess how this sector has performed. RMG is said to be the highest foreign currency earner but most of this earning is spent to pay the cost of import of raw materials.
This sector creates record number of employment particularly for rural women but deprives its labour force of minimum facilities. This important sector enjoys many facilities from the government and its players misuse the resources for their personal comfort.
That is why, after leading the country's economy for several decades, the RMG sector is yet to have its feet strong enough to stand on its own.
All these make clear that the RMG sector has so far been run with the greed to earn profits more than usual by all concerned including the factory owners.
As the authorities concerned responsible to supervise the sector, who should have found out these irregularities are allegedly corrupt, the government has to suffer the loss of millions of Taka in revenue loss every year.
The National Board of Revenue (NBR) has recently identified 20 RMG factories which realised cash incentive worth some Tk 172 million abusing bond facilities.
Although, government came to know about the abuse of bond facilities by the RMG factories long ago, this time it was found serious enough to warrant action against these factories after probing the allegation. This is a good sign.
We also expect that this action to be taken without delay. This is necessary to bring discipline in the sector and make it workable properly. But to do so, the government has to take actions against those banks and custom officials who were involved in this malpractice. This is needed to root out corruption from all levels by setting examples.
Mazhar Khandaker
Agrabad
Chittagong
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