Finance Adviser Dr Salehuddin Ahmed on Tuesday said he is ‘reasonably comfortable’ with the current state of the country’s economy.
“I’m comfortable from the economic side. We are, more or less, a bit confident,” he told reporters after a meeting of the Advisers Council Committee on Public Purchase at the Secretariat.
The adviser, however, criticised the way poverty is being measured in recent surveys.
When his attention was drawn regarding a report that stated the poverty rate of the country has increased significantly, Dr Salehuddin questioned the methodology. “Somebody said poverty has increased based on telephone interviews of 5,000 people. I know how they measure it,” he said.
He said one person even told him to write a paper and a firm will provide answers from 20,000 respondents by tomorrow. “Still, I admit there are challenges regarding poverty.”
Quoting Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, the adviser said, “He once remarked that you don’t always need complex tools to measure extreme poverty—you can often recognise it by simply observing the people’s faces and conditions.”
Responding to a question about inflation, he said Bangladesh has reduced the rate from 11–14% to around 8%. “If we could bring it down to 4%, we would be truly delighted.”
Sought comments on the government’s Tk 420-crore plan to procure body cameras for the upcoming election, Dr Salehuddin said, “You will understand that later.”
He said everything will be cleared later by his action but the adviser refrained from commenting on Bangladesh’s reported purchase of 20 war planes from China for USD 2.2 billion.
Asked whether a new pay scale is on the cards for government employees, he said, “I’ll look into it later—perhaps before I leave for the United States.”
