Universities in the United States are now recruiting academicians. As part of the hiring process, Ghanaian George Agye spoke at a Department of Economics employment seminar. George studied how to expedite a manufacturing process for his doctorate.

How variation in gender and caste can balance production and how a ‘bottleneck’ blocks the entire production process wherever it occurs. George used the example of an airport where all other counters function poorly and flight delays exacerbate passengers’ suffering if there is even one slow counter. I shudder at the example connecting it with Dhaka Airport, where unnecessary queues of passengers while traveling abroad and waiting for luggage when arriving home is a regular phenomenon.

Bangladesh has definitely progressed in the past 15 years, but the advantages of this progress are being greatly diminished by some bottlenecks. The new government should identify these bottlenecks and direct planned resources towards them. If the funding for development is modest, there is no harm. A modest development budget is required until the tax-to-GDP ratio increases to 12–14%.

The time has come to eliminate minor obstacles in order to boost the effectiveness of major undertakings, which will make repaying debt simple. The enormous projects’ return would not rise till then. In addition, massive projects end up being a burden in the future just like the case of Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

I went to Dhaka this autumn. After arriving at Dhaka airport, I called my brother who lives in Mohammadpur. It took an hour and a half for the car to arrive Mohammadpur Town Hall from Airport, that too after using the Farmgate-Airport Expressway. Even without the expressway, it would have taken the same or less time. Then the question comes: What is the benefit of expressway? This indicates there is an outage or bottleneck in the project. Indeed, this is the same old story of constructing a bridge without connecting roads in a large beel. Now is not the time for mega developments, but for ensuring coordination and dynamics of those that have taken place. It is a sign of prudence to undertake small collaborative projects to speed up the entry and exit channels of an expressway. Otherwise, the high blood pressure of the heart will burst the veins.

In comparison to other regions of the country, the highway to my in-laws’ place in Tangail from Dhaka looks to be more intelligently designed. When a bazaar is close by, it rises above the street. There is a secondary route next to it for slower-moving cars, which is necessary given Bangladesh’s current circumstances. However, I was tortured as I set out to travel to Nalitabari from Dhaka. Much money was spent on constructing the highway that connects Gazipur and Mymensingh. I had no idea that it would eventually become a tumultuous jumble of parking lots, village bazaars, shop balconies, the path across from rickshaws and boats, or a hub for local buses to pick up passengers. After entering Mymensingh city comes another pain. There does not seem to be any administration. At least in the next two budgets, the work of the finance ministry should be to remove these ‘blocks’.

Before George came Wendy Wong, a Chinese job applicant from the University of Chicago, who studied India’s bureaucratic-run rural projects for her PhD. Additionally, Wong instructed a class of aspiring bureaucrats at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Public Policy. Ever since, she has developed an interest in this topic. She has provided evidence of how more audits result in higher productivity and lower costs for social security programmes. I raised the topic of development in Bangladesh with Wong when she came in for an interview. She lacked a thorough understanding of Bangladesh’s specifics but mentioned the well-known ‘O-ring’ theory of economic development by her Chicago-based instructor, Michael Kremer who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2019. The base of Kremer's theory of development was the failure of the US spacecraft Challenger destroyed in just 73 seconds after launch in January 1986. The accident occurred due to the failure of an O-shaped ring or circle (known as a gasket). Kremer learned from it and presented his ‘O-ring’ theory in 1993 that reads any complex and large project can fail due to the lack of even one component or its faulty location.

This is the bottleneck of development. In any development project, the surrounding environment has to be done with equal importance. Otherwise, the project itself becomes meaningless. Rather than investing $10 million in 10 projects, seven projects ought to be started and the remaining $3 million must be supplied for the security and completion of those seven. There is more to the Padma Bridge project than just constructing a bridge; it includes the price of building new roads on either side of it and maintaining bridges.

Ahead of the elections, the government has started a number of projects. Minimal ‘backup’ or supplementary investments should be made in addition to these. The rail link between Chattogram and Cox’s Bazar suddenly flooded recently. As a commoner, we can question, why? The answer is bottlenecks were left behind by constructing fewer culverts. Officials said they did not expect such a flood. Then the question comes, despite living in the reality of climate change if the wise planners are proven wrong in just a few years, then who will do the visionary projects? Bangladeshi planners have already sealed a place in the record book for spending the highest construction cost per kilometre.

We do not intend to remove this bottleneck in our development thinking, but rather many times bottleneck is created for the sake of extra income. However, it is possible to ensure the benefits of development if budget and construction work are managed by identifying these bottlenecks of development first. Now, it is high time to look into it.

The writer is a Professor of Economics at the State University of New York