THE people of Bangladesh are all too familiar with the deceptive nature of sugar-coated political manifestos, which remain in discussion up until election time and are only to be shelved the moment a party takes office after the election, replaced by policies that often turn out to be deeply anti-people. In a country where commerce, industry, and governance are structurally dominated by oligarchs-turned-politicians, implementing pro-people policy without changing the architecture of the state is not just challenging; it is almost impossible. The energy and power sector stands as a definitive example of this reality, where state policy consistently sides with multimillion-dollar power plant owners to maintain the status quo regardless of how much money these syndicates have syphoned from the state exchequer through capacity charges — a mechanism that guarantees payments for installed power plants for years, even without generating a single kilowatt of electricity, alongside sweeping tax exemptions. Furthermore, numerous power plant contracts were awarded without any competitive bidding process, serving as a shortcut to transfer public money into private pockets.
To provide a legal safeguard for these institutionalised irregularities, an indemnity law was passed in the parliament in 2010. It ensured that no policymaker, bureaucrat or power plant owner could ever be brought to court. Surprisingly, all of these actions were orchestrated in the name of public welfare, creating a perfect stage for an Orwellian state where corruption was legal, looting was celebrated and questioning the status quo was life-threatening. However, following the fall of the previous regime through the July 2024 mass uprising, we want to believe that the sacrifices of thousands of lives will not be in vain. It is because of them that Bangladesh was spared from becoming a completely failed state. The mismanagement and corruption in the power sector had reached such a scale that it had become a gigantic black hole, sucking in the hard-earned income of ordinary citizens. Therefore, it is now more necessary than ever to scrutinise every action taken by the new government right from the beginning, ensuring that we don’t see the creation of yet another Frankenstein.
Rhetoric vs reality
THE BNP’s election manifesto explicitly promised to dismantle the decayed energy infrastructure that continues to bleed our economy. The numbers are staggering: for over 15 years since 2009, private sector power plant owners pocketed more than one lakh crore taka (exceeding $8 billion) solely in ‘capacity charges’ for infrastructure that sat completely idle. Despite this glaring history of exploitation, the newly elected government has yet to produce a concrete strategy to stop this economic haemorrhaging permanently. Worse still, to set the example so that no one ever dares to commit such crimes again, there is no clear plan to hold accountable the policymakers, bureaucrats and experts who either actively engineered or passively facilitated this environment of institutionalised looting — one that systematically enriched a select few at the expense of ordinary citizens.
The BNP’s election manifesto also clearly committed to a least-cost electricity generation model, a modernised grid infrastructure to reduce system losses and comprehensive upgrades to ageing power plants, reforms that would finally ensure an uninterrupted, high-quality power supply and lower costs for the public. Yet, the administration has opted for the easiest, laziest political escape route, hitting citizens the hardest by pushing price hikes directly onto the consumers. Rather than starting to address structural inefficiencies, the government aggressively raised fuel prices by Tk 15 to Tk 20 across different categories in April and slapped residential consumers with a staggering 18 per cent electricity tariff hike this June. Ultimately, the price hikes in the power sector are designed to sustain capacity payments to private operators, perpetuating a toxic cycle of crony capitalism. Instead of squeezing the public, the government should reverse its priorities: aggressively tax the corporate entities profiting off these power plants and heavily subsidise the consumers. Under the current framework, public subsidies are being distorted to make the ultra-rich even richer; repurposed correctly, they would serve as a vital social investment in human welfare. To understand just how vicious this cycle is, one only needs to look at Summit Group and its affiliates. As one of the primary beneficiaries of the power sector’s capacity payment structure for over a decade and a half, the conglomerate has received roughly Tk 10,000 crore (nearly $1 billion) since 2009 till 2024 for power plants that often sat idle. Coincidentally, the 2024 Forbes Billionaires List valued the net worth of Summit’s chairman, Aziz Khan, who has consistently ranked among Singapore’s wealthiest residents, at an identical $1.1 billion. While the company continues to extract revenue from Bangladesh, its chairman has consolidated his citizenship and wealth safely in Singapore following the fall of the previous regime in 2024. Therefore, it is guaranteed that, without systematically dismantling this pipeline that transfers public money into private, offshore pockets, cases like this will continue to repeat indefinitely no matter which party runs the government.
Poverty v policy
FOLLOWING a recent tariff hike announcement, the minister of information claimed that the price increase would not affect the bottom 65 per cent of the country’s population. He was referring to the policy of freezing tariffs for residential consumers whose monthly electricity usage does not exceed 75 units. However, a quick look at the math reveals a stark, unsettling reality. Consider a modest household running just two 15-watt lightbulbs and two 80-watt fans for 16 hours a day. Their monthly consumption already crosses 90 units. If the minister’s claim is correct, it means the government acknowledges that 65 per cent of the population lives in such extreme poverty that they cannot even afford to run two bulbs and two fans, let alone a refrigerator, an iron or a rice cooker. Shouldn’t an elected government respond to such extreme hardship with the utmost urgency? Instead of merely exempting them from a tariff hike under the assumption that they live in near-darkness, shouldn’t the state proactively reach out to this bottom 65 per cent with direct assistance? This is especially critical as the rest of the population cools themselves with additional fans, air coolers and air conditioners against the extreme summer heat under the new normal of climatic emergency. We can only hope the government has not abandoned its most vulnerable citizens and that the upcoming budget will provide meaningful relief.
Policy makers clearly do not belong to the poorest spectrum of society. But without empathy and a baseline understanding of the daily lives of the poor, policy inevitably becomes a mockery of their struggle. If policymakers understood the ground reality, they would know that the poorest families cannot navigate the complex bureaucracy required to secure an individual, dedicated electric supply line. Millions of day labourers, rickshaw pullers, street hawkers, garment workers and domestic helpers flock to megacities like Dhaka and Chittagong in search of a livelihood. They are forced to live in precarious urban settlements where landlords hold a single authorised electric meter, running makeshift cables to various rented rooms and shacks. These low-wage tenants already spend a significant portion of their income on cooking fuel and electricity. They are either charged a flat, inflated monthly rate decided arbitrarily by landlords or they pay exorbitant rates based on unauthorised downstream submeters. When just nine poor families share a single main meter and each consumes a modest 75 units of electricity, the main meter easily crosses the 600-unit threshold, the highest, most expensive residential tariff tier. Consequently, the poorest of the poor end up paying the electricity rates intended for the wealthy. By failing to realise this, policymakers are not just crafting flawed policies; they are trapped in an illusion, managing poverty on paper while remaining utterly detached from the lives of the people.
Becoming a pro-people government is a process. It is a continuous trial where the administration must prove itself at every single stage, be it ensuring accountability for every one of its decisions, maintaining transparency in every one of its actions and systematically dismantling the institutional architectures that protect oligarchic interests. Unfortunately, mocking the public’s grievances in the parliament, denouncing the reality of heinous sufferings amidst scorching summer heat due to hours of load-shedding across the country, denying the adverse impacts of tariff hikes, and opting for easy price escalations on fuel and electricity rather than modernising power plants, upgrading distribution lines, and reducing inefficiency-induced losses do not signal a promising start for the current BNP government. While it is true that during the BNP-led coalition government from 2001 to 2006, the power sector was marred by mismanagement, corruption, and anti-people policies like open-pit coal mining, history does not have to repeat itself simply because the same party is back in power. The government still has a choice to break the cycle.
Mowdud Rahman is an engineer and a researcher.