Development activities need to expand to rural areas. Industries to be set up in countryside to bring work to people; this will contribute to greater income redistribution and stop Dhaka bound migration.
AB Mirza Azizul Islam, a noted economist and former adviser to an interim government while speaking to The Daily Observer on "What We Want In Fiscal Budget," made a strong case for increased budgetary allocations to agriculture and rural economy.

He said overcrowding in cities can be reduced using budgetary measures particularly aimed at enhancing rural economic activities. It will be an effective way of reducing poverty and improve the quality of rural life.
The government is doing this over the years, he said but next budgets should take more and more rural allocative measures as a means of transferring resources at the grassroots. It is important at a time when the urban-rural income gap is astronomically widening.
He said higher GDP alone that not matters, quality of development and access of the common people to high growth is equally important. Budget must earmark targeted allocations to narrow the rich-poor gap before it is going to create new challenge for social stability, he said.
The size of the budget is too big now and a small percentage of corruption amounts to big money. So governance and the rule of law must be high on the budget for better utilization of the budgetary resources, he said.      
AB Mirza Azizul Islam said the budget should fix the problems of the banking sector to reduce default loans. This is important to save banks from growing liquidity crisis. Banks have not enough money now to advance fresh loans slowing investment and employment generation in the private sector. This in turn is bringing set back to achieving targeted growth.     The new budget also needs to focus on fixing growing balance of payment problem. Remittance must be encouraged in formal channel at incentive exchange rate for expatriate families. Problems at ports must be fixed to plug fake imports using wrong declarations. Particularly the budget must have effective measures to plug over invoicing now being widely used for massive capital flight.
Mirza Aziz said it is not always good to have a mega budget concentrating investment in big projects while denying allocations to other important projects in other sectors. Politically motivated projects need to be avoided and for better and quality implementation of projects in the ADP the government should strengthen capacity of development agencies, he said.  
He suggested higher allocation for education, communication, health and social safety net programmes. VAT and corporate tax must be lowered. Budget must take measures to bring all taxable persons under tax net to generate more revenue for the government to reduce borrowing.
AB Mirza Azizul Islam said tax rebate and cash incentives may be increased for export oriented industries trying to diversity exports. Budget must reduce cost of doing business to lure domestic and foreign investment.
It may be achieved reforming regulatory system and reducing registration fees and other utility costs. Such cost may be outweighed by enhancing efficiency of resource use and government bureaucracy, he said.    
He said the country is enjoying relative political stability. The budget must offer investment friendly measures to use the best of it.  
AB Mirza Azizul Islam said budget must put special emphasis on SME development. Big industries are switching to labour saving technologies including garment industry. The spread of SME may slowly prove as an effective alternative to generate local employment and increase productivity. It will cut poverty. It is time the country must invest more in training and human development, he said
He said we have enough electricity at the moment and attempts may be made to come out of high cost private power producers cycle to go back to public sector at low cost electricity. We must go for more gas field development, he said.
Similarly big infrastructure projects must end soon and attention must go to creating highly efficient roads and highways and transport system. It is important for accelerated socio-economic development, he said.
The budget should also address the environment issues as the nation is going to face the growing danger from sea level rise, climate refugees and intrusion of salinity in coastal belt. The government must slowly rely on more national efforts as international aid will not be enough to mitigate the challenges, he said.