Curbing corruption, injustice key to ending poverty: Planning minister

Planning Minister MA Mannan Wednesday said curbing corruption, irregularities and injustice in society is the key to attaining a full success in poverty alleviation.

"Injustice and wrongdoing have plagued our society, but it is impossible to achieve a hundred percent success in poverty alleviation if we cannot defeat these social menaces," he said.  

Minister Mannan came up with the observation while addressing a workshop styled "International Indexes in Achieving SDGs" at Porishankhyan Bhaban in the capital's Agargaon yesterday.

The Access to Information (a2i) project of the Prime Minister's Office and the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics jointly organised the event.  

About the key focus of the workshop, international indexes, the planning minister said these can serve as indicators for achieving progress. We can decide as to which sector needs more attention on the basis of the indexes and can improve our global outlook by ensuring progress across all sectors.

However, he cautioned that such indexes many a time are used by vested quarters for political gains and do not reflect the actual scenario. Thus, he claimed that bad ratings should not dishearten us and rather we should continue with our main task - ensuring multidimensional progress.

Saurendranath Chakrabhartty, secretary of Statistics and Information Management Division chaired the event while Dr Dipankar Roy, deputy secretary of Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics and Ramiz Uddin, head of data management of A2i project, presented the keynote paper.

Nazibur Rahman, principal secretary to the prime minister; Abul Kalam Azad, the prime minister's chief coordinator on SDGs; Shamsul Alam, member of General Economic Division at Ministry of Planning; Sudipto Mukherjee, country representative of

UNDP and Mohammad Tajul Islam, acting director general of Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics were also present at the workshop.