DHAKA, June 30, (v7n): State Minister for Planning Md. Zonayed Abdur Rahim Saki, MP, has emphasized the need for widespread stakeholder consultation to upgrade the institutional capacity of the Bangladesh Public Procurement Authority (BPPA) as its regulatory duties expand.

Speaking as the chief guest at a BPPA workshop focused on enhancing the electronic Government Procurement (e-GP) platform, the State Minister noted that legal changes are required to break up market concentration and open up public tenders to a wider, more inclusive group of participants. He announced that both the Public Procurement Act and the Public Procurement Rules will need to be amended to eliminate existing entry barriers and ensure greater market competition.

The consultation workshop, hosted on the Bangladesh Planning Commission campus, brought together over 30 representatives from state agencies, business associations, academia, and the media. During the sessions, BPPA Chief Executive Officer SM Moin Uddin Ahmed shared plans to transform the e-GP platform into a fully automated, citizen-centric system, adding that future feedback sessions will be expanded to the divisional, district, and upazila levels to capture nationwide user experiences.

Participants at the workshop raised concerns regarding a proposed 110-member organizational framework for the BPPA, concluding that such staffing levels would be entirely inadequate to manage the authority's growing burdens in compliance tracking, research, policy development, and countrywide training. Attendees also pushed for better data integration between the e-GP system and other automated public sector databases to maximize transparency.

Highlighting the urgency of these updates, Implementation Monitoring and Evaluation Division (IMED) Secretary Shirajun Noor Chowdhury explained that procurement issues and land acquisition remain the two primary drivers behind delayed state development projects. To fix these bottlenecks, he concluded that the government must prioritize modernizing the e-GP grid with advanced technologies while expanding specialized procurement training to ministry-level officials to ensure stronger institutional oversight.

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