Businesses to get power connection in 28 days: Power Division

The power division will drastically reduce the time for new electric connections to investors in an effort to improve Bangladesh's ranking in the World Bank’s ‘doing business’ ratings.

“The allotment time will be brought down to 28 days,” Secretary In-Charge of the division Ahmad Kaikaus announced on Saturday at a BIDA workshop in a Bahubal resort in Habiganj.
 
The World Bank has ranked Bangladesh 176th among 190 countries in its 'Doing Business 2017' report. It is behind of all SAARC countries, except war-torn Afghanistan.
 
According to the report, getting electricity in Bangladesh takes 428.9 days and costs 2860.9 percent of income per capita.
 
And globally Bangladesh stands at 187 in the ranking of 190 economies when it comes to getting electric connection , which is one of the 11 indicator sets of the doing business ranking.
 

The newly-created Bangladesh Investment Development Authority (BIDA) aims to improve Bangladesh's ranking to at least 99 by 2021.

To do so, it brought all top officials of all relevant ministries to the Habiganj resort to discuss and devise action plans.

The power secretary thanked the BIDA for the 'eye-opening' workshop and said, “We did not realise that there are some cumbersome processes in the way of doing business.”

“After coming here we have discussed and calculated that we can reduce the time to 28 days and this we’ll implement after going back to Dhaka,” he said.

BIDA Executive Chairman Kazi M Aminul Islam acknowledged it as a 'positive change' while moderating the session.

The power secretary, however, said this 28 days time would be calculated after submitting a complete set of documents require for their scrutiny. “Once we get all documents, then we can expedite our clearance time”.

He said the World Bank study had taken “extreme cases”. “Usually it does not take such long time. Sometimes people apply without proper papers and then we ask them to bring those documents and they take time. The study had calculated that time also while measuring the delay in getting electricity,” he told bdnews24.com, on the sidelines of the discussion.
 
“After the initiative of BIDA, we have been able to reduce 95 percent of the time which is a very significant exercise,” he said.
 
He, however, reminded of the power crisis in Bangladesh, and said there is a huge demand- supply gap.