Industries minister Dilip Barua has said his ministry will formulate a policy to ensure expansion of industries and safeguard the interests of both the entrepreneurs and workers.
   In an interview with New Age, Dilip Barua, the newly appointed minister in Sheikh Hasina’s government and a career left-winger, said that an atmosphere conducive to growth of industries has been created after the return of democracy.
   ‘We will encourage local entrepreneurs and the medium and small scale industries will get priority’, he said adding that suggestions from local investors would also be sought in this regard.
   Responding to a question about his tasks ahead, the minister, also the general secretary of Samyabadi Dal, a partner of the AL-led alliance that swept to power in the last general elections, said he intended to follow a three-phase strategy –short-term, mid-term and long-term – to revitalise the country’s industrial sector.
   ‘The new government’s vision 2021 will not be achieved without revitalising the industrial sector,’ he told New Age at his secretariat office Monday.
   Apart from creating an investment-friendly atmosphere to attract foreign investors, the government would also invite Bangladeshi expatriates to set up new industries in the country, said the minister.
   ‘We will also safeguard the interests of the industrial workers’, said Barua, inducted in Sheikh Hasina’s cabinet as a technocrat minister.
   The main focus of the new policy would be to safeguard the local industries, improve the quality of products and increase use of local products, he said.
   Replying to a question on disinvestment of mills and factories, Barua said that the government would first try to make the state-owned enterprises profitable and then decide on the fate of the sick ones.
   Referring to various problems arising from fertiliser crisis in the past, he assured all that there was no fertiliser crisis during the on-going Boro season and that the government had a stock of around 14.5 lakh tonnes of urea against an estimated demand for 12.5 lakh tonnes.
   He warned against hoarding of urea fertiliser saying that the government would take stern action if there were any attempts to create an artificial crisis of urea.
   When his attention was drawn to the views of the editor of an English language daily who had wondered how a left-wing politician would deal with entrepreneurs, who Barua considered exploiters in nature, he said he would follow the guidelines of the government in running the ministry.
   ‘We want to increase the number of industries in the country and my political ideologies are not contradictory to, rather coherent with the policies’, he said.

Source: New Age