Harness potentials of the country’s light engineering

The Business Initiative Leading Bangladesh (BUILD) sounded right when it said that the country’s Light Engineering Industry Development Policy-2022 does not feature any special provision for attracting foreign direct investment to the sector. The BUILD made this comment at its 8th meeting of the SME Development Working Committee at the ministry of industries on Monday.
Attracting FDI is not only important for the other sectors, this is also necessary for the light engineering sector. We time and again pointed out that Bangladesh’s export basket must contain other products in a significant way leaving its dependency on the garments alone. The western countries take our garments and, because of availability of cheap labour, Bangladesh is up until now able to survive in a fiercely competitive garments business. Once the labour becomes a little costly, and one day it will inevitably become so, Bangladesh’s garment products may not be able to face the challenge of stiff global competition.
Hence the necessity of developing the other sectors and country’s light engineering can hold this potential since at this point of time Bangladesh cannot build its economic strength on heavy engineering.
Earlier on September 29, the industries ministry issued the light engineering policy with an aim of flourishing the sector to attain the goal of increasing industrial sectors’ contribution to GDP to 40 per cent, setting an action plan to ensure developed infrastructure, industrial park, easy financing and industrial incentives for the sector by 2027.
The government has set 11 strategic targets for this policy, including infrastructural development, modernisation of technology, development of forward and backward linkages, human capital development, market expansion, research and development, industrial cluster development, establishing common facility centre, quality assurance and certification, financing and development of investment environment, and industrial incentives.
However, technology transfer remains a problem in Bangladesh and the government wants to overcome this constraint by using artificial intelligence, but the fact is it has no policy to this end. It was revealed in Monday’s meeting that only five countries such as China, the US, India, Singapore and Japan import about $2.51 trillion of light engineering products each year. Here is a huge prospect as the BUILD CEO pointed out. If Bangladesh can meet just one per cent of these countries’ requirements it can increase exports to about $25 billion worth of products from the light engineering sector.