Increase public involvement in govt procurement: Experts

Experts have called for increasing people's involvement in government procurement to ensure sustainable development.

Ensuring people's involvement in public procurement is challenging but important, because it ensures transparency and accountability, said Planning Minister MA Mannan at a meeting of the Public-Private Stakeholders' Committee of the Central Procurement Technical Unit of the Implementation Monitoring and Evaluation Division (IMED) yesterday.

For the convenience of people, the minister suggested installing signboards with detailed project information in Bangla at the construction sites of each project.

At the same time, criticising the repeated changing of pavement tiles in the name of development, he said there is no point in installing coloured tiles every few days.

At the meeting, presided over by IMED Secretary Abul Kashem Md Mohiuddin, State Minister for Planning Dr Shamsul Alam said transparency is ensured by setting up an electronic system in government procurement.

He also said there used to be news of murder over bagging tenders in the past, but there is no such thing anymore.

At the meeting, economist Dr Ahsan H Mansur suggested increasing public involvement in the implementation of small projects as well as in big ones.

He expressed the hope that the Central Procurement Technical Unit's "Citizen Portal" will play an important role in providing information on government purchases at the field level.

Highlighting the recent progress of Electronic Government Procurement (e-GP) system, Central Procurement Technical Unit Director General Mohammad Shoheler Rahman Chowdhury said the Public-Private Stakeholder Committee has been constituted with representatives from public and private sectors to provide recommendations and guidance on the overall development of public procurement activities.

Senior Research Fellow of Brac Institute of Governance and Development (BIGD) Dr Mirza M Hassan presented a model of citizens' involvement in government procurement at the meeting.

Dr Munshi Sulaiman, director of research at BIGD, gave another presentation on impact assessment of people's involvement.

He said BIGD has implemented citizen engagement activities in 48 upazilas in four years as an appointed consultant of the procurement technical unit under the Digitising Implementation Monitoring and Public Procurement Project.