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A RECENT newspaper report on mobile operators said the number of mobile telephone subscribers stood at 45.21 million in February 2009. That means one every three or four Bangladeshis now has a mobile phone. In comparison, according to wikipedia and CIA fact book, Bangladesh had only half a million internet users in March 2008. Mobile operators, however, claim to have four million internet users through their mobile networks. Be it half a million or five million, the number of internet users cannot match the figure for mobile phone penetration in Bangladesh. It is worthwhile to mention here that both the internet service providers and the mobile phone operators began their journey almost at the same time. So, why is this frustrating figure of internet penetration in Bangladesh –who is to be blamed for this poor performance? Can the Bangladesh Telecom Regulatory Commission escape responsibility for this poor show? It is the policy guidelines or rules that encourage or discourage performance. When policy was favourable for mobile phone operators why it could not become helpful for the internet service providers? Are we thinking of poverty alleviation through advancement in mobile phone communication only?
   The universities and software companies can purchase bandwidth from the Bangladesh Telephone Company Limited at a reduced rate. Public universities and schools can purchase bandwidth at 50 per cent of the existing rate from the BTCL. But the ISPs cannot give the reduction because they are not allowed price concession for selling bandwidth to the universities and schools. Why the ISPs are getting differential treatment? ISPs cannot sell voice-enabled bandwidth to the call centres because separate licence will be necessary for it. One ISP marketing chief joked once that they were left with selling bandwidth to the betel leaf shops and the domestic users only. Under the circumstances of reducing customer base, can the ISPs scattered all over Bangladesh survive? Can we deny that ISPs all over Bangladesh provided employment opportunities for thousands of IT literate youths? With a little bit of policy support from the BTRC, the ISPs could be a potential source of employment in the remotest districts of Bangladesh.
   Sometimes ISPs were branded as a bunch of thieves encouraging illegal call termination but no body asked them why they are doing it or are they really doing it? What has gone wrong that has forced some of them, if not all, to indulge in illegal activities? Since 2002 the BTRC has remained anchored in Dhaka never peeping out of their elegant office windows to see what has gone wrong in Chittagong, Khulna, Rajshahi, Bogra or Sylhet excepting sending troops to raid ISP installations in these places in the name of tracking illegal VoIP activities. They have issued directives after directives to the ISPs, sometimes with only three days’ notice, flooding them with dos and don’ts, threatening them with cancellation of their licences if they are not effectively monitoring the IPs of their clients against illegal voice traffic. Sometimes they have ensured business for companies by issuing directives, in the name of load balancing, to purchase 45 per cent bandwidth from each of the two international internet gateways in the country – the BTCL and Mango Tele Services Limited.
   They never inquired: (1) whether the ISPs have qualified manpower to monitor the illegal activities, (2) whether the small ISPs are capable of managing their bandwidth by purchasing/utilising sophisticated bandwidth manager, (3) whether the revenues they earn allow them to bear these additional expenses for specialized manpower, (4) whether the ISPs can do policing and become hostile with people on suspicion with whom they will have to work for their very existence, (5). whether the ISPs need any training, financial or technological support. The BTRC may even think that it is not their business. Then whose business is it?
   Does the BTRC have any idea as to how many ISPs beyond the capital Dhaka can utilise a bandwidth of 5MB and above? The BTRC kept a blind eye when the BTCL insisted that the minimum fibre-optic bandwidth that an ISP can purchase is 3MB. No matter whether a division or district level ISP has a requirement of 3MB bandwidth or not, to have the advantage of reduced price they must buy a bandwidth of 3MB or above. If they want to buy a bandwidth less than 3MB they will have to go for costly DDN bandwidth. A bandwidth of 3MB or above is nothing for ISPs in Dhaka because they will be able to consume it. But it is a serious matter for ISPs in Khulna or Rajshahi – can they consume 3MB bandwidth to begin with? When the BTCL adopted policies that discouraged internet use in the remote divisional or district towns, the BTRC simply kept quiet. If policies are so unfriendly, can anybody guess how long it will take to transform Bangladesh into a digital Bangladesh?
   When our policies and guidelines are encouraging concentration of business in Dhaka in the hands of a few giant companies, most of which do not encourage people’s ownership through offering of public share, how are we dreaming of poverty alleviation? When the internet penetration in the country is so insignificant how can we dream of a digital Bangladesh? It is time that we assessed the contribution of our telecom policy, telecom rules and regulations, tariff, etc in bringing in the essential knowledge and information to the masses; in increasing the purchasing capacity of our people; in spreading the income from the ICT sector to the whole country.
   Though the terms and conditions of the ISP licence say that ISPs cannot deny an internet connection to anybody unless such connectivity is legally untenable or technically not feasible, the BTRC found it easy to blame and harass the ISPs for the wrongdoings of their clients. On one such raid by the BTRC and the troops in a commercial building in Chittagong at around 10.00am, observed one bystander, the BTRC team exercised power and forced the passengers out of the lift to make room for them to go upstairs. It is a very insignificant incident but it had its mark on the regular users of the building. What others will think about the ISP where the BTRC team is going to raid? A business organisation is defamed before being proved guilty.
   A retired army officer rented out a small room of his building to an ISP for using it as their remote sub-station. The Rapid Action Battalion and the police raided the house at the dead of night. They found no illegal VoIP equipment but were engaged in a heated debate with the landlord on the necessity of raiding at the dead of night. The landlord served a notice to the ISP next day to vacate his premises because he is not willing to entertain this kind of irritating incident at his house.
   These are not isolated incidents; it is happening regularly. People are not reporting it for fear of repercussion and retaliation. The BTRC has published advertisement in the newspaper warning people against renting out apartments to illegal VoIP businessmen. How can a member of the general public distinguish between illegal VOIP activities and legal ISP activities? As a result, any equipment that goes with optical fibre has become a suspect. Even RAB and police officials often followed the fibre-optic cable while looking for illegal VoIP users. Even an ordinary home user is not immune from this suspicion.
   ISPs are now losing respect and finding it difficult to get appropriate accommodation at reasonable rent for their usage. If it is part of a government policy to create panic and discourage small investors from running ISP business, to pave the way for big investors to come in, then we have nothing to say. Can we expect the ISPs working under financial stress, indignity and humiliation to deliver the output they are mandated to?
   If by doing all these exercises illegal VoIP activities are reduced, we would be rather happy. But it is not the case – illegal activities are on the increase. There are allegations that some of the VoIP equipment confiscated finds its way back to the market again. That means we have flaws in our regulations, flaws in our implementation methodology. Our regulations are not credible. Nobody can stop advancement in technology. If voice port is blocked and IP is blocked, people may go for VPN, encryption or other technologies. ICT is such an advancing sector that new technologies are coming in almost every day. People will always be able to find a way out when they are technically challenged. Therefore, stopping illegal VOIP activity by technical means alone is bound to be a futile exercise.
   When there is a significant price difference between the legal and illegal market, illegal VOIP activities will flourish. The BTRC can very easily stop or reduce the illegal VOIP activities simply by reforming tariff. If the rates for call termination in Bangladesh are significantly reduced to become closer to the local call rates then there will be no or very little illegal voice traffic. Currently average local call rate in Bangladesh is Tk 0.90 per minute which is equivalent to about 1.05 US cent. If international call termination rate is reduced to about two cents per minute then illegal voice traffic will be greatly reduced. Somebody might say government revenue will fall. On the contrary, government revenue will rather increase – more traffic will be routed through legal channel. Instead of controlling illegal voice traffic through tariff reform and credible regulations, the BTRC is trying to do it through the ISPs by coercion which is not fair and pragmatic. Coercive and impractical policies pursued by the BTRC may be blamed for the insignificant penetration of internet in the country. When ten thousand mobile phones were added in average per day, increase in the number of internet users were limited to only 105 persons per day, in the past thirteen years.
   Our telecom regulator has become more revenue conscious – there is nothing wrong in it if it is beneficial for the country and the people at large. Recently, the BTRC has granted licenses for international gateway, international internet gateway, interconnection exchange and Wimax to a few companies in exchange of a hefty license fee. Business, thus, has gone to a few people who by remaining in Dhaka and by utilising a few technical hands can control the whole business and reap the exclusive benefit of deriving good return from their investment. Again from, a capitalistic point of view, there is nothing wrong in it because an investor is expected to try maximising his benefit. But is it right from a pro-poor welfare point of view? The activities that can be spread in the whole of the country, the activities that could have engaged a lot of IT literate unemployed youths in earning a livelihood legally were centralised in Dhaka catering to the requirement of a fortunate few. Going against their favoured slogan of poverty alleviation through ICT, our telecom regulator BTRC did everything to keep the returns from this huge economic bonanza in a few hands.
   Why VoIP could not be open for all? What’s wrong if there are fifty thousand VoIP licenses through out the country? The government will not lose revenue if VoIP licensees are connected to international carrier through international internet gateways. In addition to licence fees VOIP licensees can also be required to pay additional charges on the basis of international call minutes utilised by them as recorded by the gateways. This will allow the income from this sector to be spread throughout the country. If poverty alleviation is the target, policies should be pro-poor. If ICT is the thrust sector in Bangladesh, if we expect ICT to be a bread-earner for the country in future, we will have to take ICT infrastructure to the remotest corner of the country. If necessary, like the agricultural sector, the government may consider giving subsidy to the remote users.
   The BTRC has issued several licenses bifurcating one activity into several sub activities. Even people engaged in the ICT sector for a long time get confused. This will encourage corruption through biased interpretation of different sub activities. Why can’t we have only a few major activities where the sub-activities can be grouped into?
   Last but not the least, if we understood it right, a regulator is a team leader working in a team towards achieving a common objective. A regulator is an enabling agent; a caring friend for its licensees. It is supposed to frame rules, regulations, and guidelines to ensure best possible return from the limited resources available. If the licensees can do business, government revenue in terms of taxes will increase. As a mentor for these licensees, the BTRC can arrange continuous training having offices located all over Bangladesh. These offices can help the licensees in understanding rules and regulations by following up and monitoring. The Bangladesh Bank as a regulator continuously offers anti-money laundering training to the bankers. Similar should be the role of the BTRC.
   Finding fault and realizing penalty cannot be the goal. Waiting for people to make mistakes can maximise penalty and reward for BTRC officers but will not help us in reaching our goal of digital Bangladesh. Insignificant internet penetration in the last thirteen years is the outcome of our failure in pursuing the right policy. We must learn from our failures and revise policies to make it pro-poor and people friendly.
   M Ali Ashraf, an engineer by profession, is a former chairman of the Institution of Engineers Bangladesh, Chittagong Centre

THE economic crisis has spawned a resurgence of interest in Karl Marx. Worldwide sales of Das Kapital have shot up (one lone German publisher sold thousands of copies in 2008, compared with 100 the year before), a measure of a crisis so broad in scope and devastation that it has global capitalism—and
   its high priests—in an ideological tailspin.
   Yet even as faith in neo-liberal orthodoxies has imploded, why resurrect Marx? To start, Marx was far ahead of his time in predicting the successful capitalist globalisation of recent decades. He accurately foresaw many of the fateful factors that would give rise to today’s global economic crisis: what he called the ‘contradictions’ inherent in a world comprised of competitive markets, commodity production, and financial speculation.
   Penning his most famous works in an era when the French and American revolutions were less than a hundred years old, Marx had premonitions of AIG and Bear Stearns trembling a century and a half later. He was singularly cognisant of what he called the ‘most revolutionary part’ played in human history by the bourgeoisie – those forerunners of today’s Wall Street bankers and corporate executives. As Marx put it in The Communist Manifesto, ‘The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society... In one word, it creates a world after its own image.’
   But Marx was no booster of capitalist globalisation in his time or ours. Instead, he understood that ‘the need for a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe,’ foreseeing that the development of capitalism would inevitably be ‘paving the way for more extensive and exhaustive crises’. Marx identified how disastrous speculation could trigger and exacerbate crises in the whole economy. And he saw through the political illusions of those who would argue that such crises could be permanently prevented through incremental reform.
   Like every revolutionary, Marx wanted to see the old order overthrown in his lifetime. But capitalism had plenty of life left in it, and he could only glimpse, however perceptively, the mistakes and wrong turns that future generations would commit. Those of us now cracking open Marx will find he had much to say that is relevant today, at least for those looking to ‘recover the spirit of the revolution’, not merely to ‘set its ghost walking again.’
   If he were observing the current downturn, Marx would certainly relish pointing out how flaws inherent in capitalism led to the current crisis. He would see how modern developments in finance, such as securitisation and derivatives, have allowed markets to spread the risks of global economic integration. Without these innovations, capital accumulation over the previous decades would have been significantly lower. And so would it have been if finance had not penetrated more and more deeply into society. The result has been that consumer demand (and hence, prosperity) in recent years has depended more and more on credit cards and mortgage debt at the same time that the weakened power of trade unions and cutbacks in social welfare have made people more vulnerable to market shocks.
   This leveraged, volatile global financial system contributed to overall economic growth in recent decades. But it also produced a series of inevitable financial bubbles, the most dangerous of which emerged in the US housing sector. That bubble’s subsequent bursting had such a profound impact around the globe precisely because of its centrality to sustaining both US consumer demand and international financial markets. Marx would no doubt point to this crisis as a perfect instance of when capitalism looks like ‘the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the netherworld whom he has called up by his spells.’
   Despite the depth of our current predicament, Marx would have no illusions that economic catastrophe would itself bring about change. He knew very well that capitalism, by its nature, breeds and fosters social isolation. Such a system, he wrote, ‘leaves no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”.’ Indeed, capitalism leaves societies mired ‘in the icy water of egotistical calculation.’ The resulting social isolation creates passivity in the face of personal crises, from factory layoffs to home foreclosures. So, too, does this isolation impede communities of active, informed citizens from coming together to take up radical alternatives to capitalism.
   Marx would ask first and foremost how to overcome this all-consuming social passivity. He thought that unions and workers’ parties developing in his time were a step forward. Thus in Das Kapital he wrote that the ‘immediate aim’ was ‘the organisation of the proletarians into a class’ whose ‘first task’ would be ‘to win the battle for democracy’. Today, he would encourage the formation of new collective identities, associations, and institutions within which people could resist the capitalist status quo and begin deciding how to better fulfil their needs.
   No such ambitious vision for enacting change has arisen from the crisis so far, and it is this void that Marx would find most troubling of all. In the United States, some recent attention-getting proposals have been derided as ‘socialist’, but only appear to be radical because they go beyond what the left of the Democratic Party is now prepared to advocate. Dean Baker, co-director of the Centre for Economic and Policy Research, for example, has called for a $2 million cap on certain Wall Street salaries and the enactment of a financial transactions tax, which would impose an incremental fee on the sale or transfer of stocks, bonds, and other financial assets. Marx would view this proposal as a perfect case of thinking inside the box, because it explicitly endorses (even while limiting) the very thing that is now popularly identified as the problem: a culture of risk disassociated from consequence. Marx would be no less derisive toward those who think that bank nationalisations – such as those that took place in Sweden and Japan during their financial crises in the 1990s – would amount to real change.
   Ironically, one of the most radical proposals making the rounds today has come from an economist at the London School of Economics, Willem Buiter, a former member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee and certainly no Marxist. Buiter has proposed that the whole financial sector be turned into a public utility. Because banks in the contemporary world cannot exist without public deposit insurance and public central banks that act as lenders of last resort, there is no case, he argues, for their continuing existence as privately owned, profit-seeking institutions. Instead they should be publicly owned and run as public services. This proposal echoes the demand for ‘centralisation of credit in the banks of the state’ that Marx himself made in the Manifesto. To him, a financial-system overhaul would reinforce the importance of the working classes’ winning ‘the battle of democracy’ to radically change the state from an organ imposed upon society to one that responds to it.
   ‘From financialisation of the economy to the socialisation of finance,’ Buiter wrote, is ‘a small step for the lawyers, a huge step for mankind.’ Clearly, you don’t need to be a Marxist to have radical aspirations. You do, however, have to be some sort of Marxist to recognise that even at a time like the present, when the capitalist class is on its heels, demoralised and confused, radical change is not likely to start in the form of ‘a small step for the lawyers’ (presumably after getting all the ‘stakeholders’ to sit down together in a room to sign a document or two). Marx would tell you that, without the development of popular forces through radical new movements and parties, the socialisation of finance will fall on infertile ground. Notably, during the economic crisis of the 1970s, radical forces inside many of Europe’s social democratic parties put forward similar suggestions, but they were unable to get the leaders of those parties to go along with proposals they derided as old-fashioned.
   Attempts to talk seriously about the need to democratise our economies in such radical ways were largely shunted aside by parties of all stripes for the next several decades, and we are still paying the price for marginalising those ideas. The irrationality built into the basic logic of capitalist markets – and so deftly analysed by Marx – is once again evident. Trying just to stay afloat, each factory and firm lays off workers and tries to pay less to those kept on. Undermining job security has the effect of undercutting demand throughout the economy. As Marx knew, micro-rational behaviour has the worst macroeconomic outcomes. We now can see where ignoring Marx while trusting in Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ gets you.
   The financial crisis today also exposes irrationalities in realms beyond finance. One example is US President Barack Obama’s call for trading in carbon credits as a solution to the climate crisis. In that supposedly progressive proposal, corporations that meet emissions standards sell credits to others that fail to meet their own targets. The Kyoto Protocol called for a similar system swapped across states. Fatefully however, both plans depend on the same volatile derivatives markets that are inherently open to manipulation and credit crashes. Marx would insist that, to find solutions to global problems such as climate change, we need to break with the logic of capitalist markets rather than use state institutions to reinforce them. Likewise, he would call for international economic solidarity rather than competition among states. As he put it in the Manifesto, ‘United action, of the leading… countries, at least, is the first condition for the emancipation of the proletariat.’
   Yet the work of building new institutions and movements for change must begin at home. Although he made the call ‘Workers of the world, unite!’ Marx still insisted that workers in each country ‘first of all settle things with their own bourgeoisie.’ The measures required to transform existing economic, political, and legal institutions would ‘of course be different in different countries.’ But in every case, Marx would insist that the way to bring about radical change is first to get people to think ambitiously again.
   How likely is that to happen? Even at a moment when the financial crisis is bleeding dry a vast swath of the world’s people, when collective anxiety shakes every age, religious, and racial group, and when, as always, the deprivations and burdens are falling most heavily on ordinary working people, the prognosis is uncertain. If he were alive today, Marx would not look to pinpoint exactly when or how the current crisis would end. Rather, he would perhaps note that such crises are part and parcel of capitalism’s continued dynamic existence. Reformist politicians who think they can do away with the inherent class inequalities and recurrent crises of capitalist society are the real romantics of our day, themselves clinging to a naive utopian vision of what the world might be. If the current crisis has demonstrated one thing, it is that Marx was the greater realist.
   Foreign Policy, May/June 2009. Leo Panitch is Canada research chair in comparative political economy and distinguished research professor of political science at York University in Toronto, and coeditor of the annual Socialist Register.

Increase in land prices

‘Four-fold increase in land prices and land registration fee reduced by 6-8 per cent’ (June 1) news item is a classic example of I give with my right hand and I take with my left. This is a self defeating policy and will not fulfil the primary objective of increasing revenue from the sale of land. Whoever had thought of this brilliant scheme should be given a prize.
   AA
   Via e-mail

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