Citizens have every right to know and oversee where and how their money is being spent. Citizens also have the right to know government procurement rules and whether the government is following the procurement laws, rules and precedents and maintaining transparency and accountability in terms of purchasing goods and services. Often, it is found that roads and bridges are destroyed within a few days of construction due to low quality work, said Abul Kalam Azad, MP, Chair, Parliamentary Standing Committee on Ministry of Planning at a Seminar titled ‘Citizen Engagement in Public Procurement’.
CPTU, IME Division of the Ministry of Planning and BRAC Institute of Governance and Development (BIGD), BRAC University co-organised this national seminar at a hotel in the capital on 1 December 2016. Farid Uddin Ahmed, Secretary of IMED chaired the seminar where Md. Faruque Hossain, DG, CPTU and Dr. Sultan Hafeez Rahman, Executive Director of BIGD made the welcome remarks. Dr. Mirza Hassan, Adjunct Fellow of BIGD and Dr. Zafrul Islam, Senior Procurement Specialist of World Bank Dhaka also spoke at the seminar.
Dr. Zafrul Islam said that public procurement is highly risky and the World Bank is happy to cooperate with the government to involve citizens with the initiative. According to the law, citizen has the right to public information and citizen engagement in public procurement can ensure transparency and accountability.
Mentioning the country's recent economic growth, Dr. Sultan Hafeez Rahman said that this is the perfect time to engage citizens to strengthen the development process.
Md. Faruque Hossain said we are accountable to the people, and the people will decide what they want to do and how. Mentioning the practical field experiences of citizen involvement in public procurement activities in Rangpur and Sirajganj, Dr Mirza Hasan said the quality of work has improved where our citizen committees have monitored the school and road constructions projects. Generally, the contractors and the people associated with the construction work are more accountable to the people and the contractors are bound to use the best quality construction materials, although many of the engineers and contractors do not like to be held accountable to the citizens. He also added that political parties felt that involving citizens in public procurement had a negative impact on their level of power.
Participants at the open discussions emphasized that the citizens of the relevant project area need to be involved from the beginning, from the stage of project planning to be well informed about the project, and be trained about the project monitoring issues. They also said that the citizen committee should be developed with honest and expert citizens based on certain criteria and a central expert citizen committee can be built. Citizen involvement in public procurement can open up new horizons, they added.
To improve transparency and accountability in the huge amount of public spending in public procurement, improve the quality of work and stop wastage to ensure the best use of public money, the government has taken the initiative to involve citizens in public procurement as a third party. BIGD is providing technical assistance to the CPTU, IMED to help design and implement the social accountability mechanism that aims to institutionalie and develop this third party monitoring system in the public procurement process in the country.