Reform did not fail, the arrangement to block it succeeded: Kazi Maruful Islam

The question heard most often since July-August 2024 is why there has been no reform of the administration. Kazi Maruful Islam, a professor in the Department of Development Studies at the University of Dhaka, argues that the question hides an assumption — that a sincere attempt at reform was made and failed. Looking at the events of the past two years, his conclusion is different: reform did not fail; the project to block reform succeeded.

He writes that after 5 August 2024 the Bangladeshi state machinery was effectively directionless. The interim government was sworn in on 8 August, but it still had no framework of policy, priorities or accountability. The police were not in the field and there was no discipline in the Secretariat. Into that vacuum, a section of the bureaucracy responded in the most organised and fastest way.

Setting out the sequence, he notes that on the night of 13 August more than a hundred senior assistant secretaries became deputy secretaries. Within a week, more than two hundred deputy secretaries became joint secretaries. On 25 August, 131 joint secretaries became additional secretaries.

A check of the gazettes showed that at least 24 officers crossed three steps in two weeks, going from senior assistant secretary to additional secretary. Officers who had retired many years earlier returned as secretaries on contract. Later, 764 retired officers were given retrospective promotions on grounds of deprivation, 119 of them as secretaries. He describes the promotion of nearly fifteen hundred officers in such a short time as without precedent.

In his view, the deprivation was not false. Over a decade and a half, many capable officers were denied promotion on the measure of party loyalty, made OSD or sent into compulsory retirement. But the remedy should have been published criteria, independent review and a legal process given time. Instead there was organised pressure in the Secretariat and overnight gazette notifications.

The Public Administration Reform Commission gave more than a hundred recommendations in February 2025 — including ending political identity vetting for promotions, barring officials from political programmes, a civil service code of conduct, an administrative ombudsman and a permanent reform commission. The commission itself had recalled that the recommendations of more than two dozen commissions and committees since independence had not endured.

This time too, 18 recommendations were picked as immediately implementable, but in practice only a few harmless items arrived, such as public hearings or declaring the passport a right. On the contrary, officers continued to be sent off under the very compulsory retirement provision the commission had spoken against, and the amendment of the Government Service Act emphasised loyalty and discipline, not service, Professor Maruful Islam writes.

On the cadres' positions, he notes that the administration cadre called the proposal for a 50 percent quota in deputy secretary posts conspiratorial. The council of 25 cadres said no quota would be accepted. The education and health cadres also raised objections. In his words, the fight looks like division, but there is an invisible consensus in keeping accountability, performance assessment and responsibility to citizens off the agenda.

On pay, he writes that at the end of August this year the elected government approved the ninth national pay scale; the minimum basic salary rose by 142 percent, and by the pay commission's calculation the extra liability is about Tk 106,000 crore. His question is about proportion — there is all-party and all-cadre consensus on raising pay, but all-party silence on raising service quality; there is no performance agreement, no mandatory time limit for delivering a service and no measure of citizen satisfaction.

As solutions, he proposes five steps. First, verification of all promotions after August 2024 by an independent review panel — not mass dismissal or revenge, but publishing the criteria and process in every case. Second, making promotion digital and verifiable, so that every officer's service history, assessments, training and punishment records sit in a secure database.

Third, measuring service quality — although e-files exist, creating a public dashboard showing which file is stuck where and for how long. Fourth, turning social media into a platform of accountability — making public responses within a set time and publication of complaint disposal statistics mandatory. Fifth, linking pay rises to performance and forming the permanent reform commission proposed by the commission, kept accountable to parliament.

In closing, he writes that an effective state does not mean only a stable state. The stability of a state that cannot serve its citizens is in fact stagnation. Unless the question is settled — whom does the administration belong to, the officer, the party or the citizen — the promise of July will not be kept, he comments.