Dr Saadat Husain, former chairman of Bangladesh Public Service Commission, passed away on April 22, 2020. Saadat Bhai, as I used to call him since I first met him in Boston, was a friend and a mentor. During the last four decades that I have known him, he and his wife Shahana were close to me and my wife, Nasreen Shibli (Rumi), and his demise is a personal loss for us.
I first met Dr Saadat Husain in September 1977, when we both enrolled in the PhD programme at Boston University. For the next two years, we were enrolled in the same programme, took the same courses, and lived in the same building. The PhD programme at Boston University is a very rigorous and demanding journey that required us to be completely immersed in an academic regime. I came straight out of Dhaka University, but Saadat Bhai had spent the previous seven years in administration. However, from the point when the first classes started, he did not miss a single beat. Some of his peers who came from government services had spent the previous summer preparing at the University of Colorado, Boulder orientation workshops before taking courses at Boston University. However, Saadat Bhai flew straight from Dhaka two days after I did, and dived in head-first. That speaks volumes about his intellectual agility and his ability to tackle complex academic problems as needed which he demonstrated during his illustrious career, first in the Civil Service of Pakistan (CSP) and then for four decades in Bangladesh government service.
Joining our cohort to study economics under the legendary Prof Gus Papanek at Boston University was Saadat Bhai’s close friend, Dr Saiful Huq, and Dr Zaidi Sattar, both of who had previous stints at Dhaka University. But Saadat Bhai, whose career in the civil service took him from the Training Academy in Lahore to wade through the mud fields of mofussil towns in independent Bangladesh, immersed himself in tackling mathematics, econometrics, and all the differential equations.
What impressed me about this unassuming and humble civil servant was his sense of values, the straight-shooter attitude, and his dedication to public service. After we finished our grinding course work in 1979 and were preparing to undertake the long and tedious work of writing our dissertation, Saadat Bhai decided that he was going to come back to Dhaka and write his dissertation in Bangladesh. This was 1981, just after the assassination of President Ziaur Rahman, and he had decided that as a Freedom Fighter he needed to come back and offer his service to the government. This surprised many of us. Of the dozens of civil servants (ex-CSPs) who were enrolled in the PhD programme, no one else had taken this decision to apply for a leave of absence at the graduate school and go back to his homeland. He felt that he had already spent three years on study leave and he owed it to the country to offer a few more years of service to the nation, and later pick up where he left off. (He came back in 1987 for a few months and finished off the dissertation.)
Saadat Bhai’s sense of humour would provide us with hours of entertainment and inspiration during the long and arduous slog through the 128 credit hours of the PhD programme. One of the toughest subjects we grappled with was in our first semester. A course in mathematical economics was a requirement, and was taught by a no-nonsense professor, Victor Cholewicki. Since our preparation at Dhaka University fell short on this aspect of higher-level work in graduate school, we all struggled with the weekly assignments and examinations. At one point, each of us, including veterans of the civil service, was nervous about getting a low grade in this course. Our mentors and seniors including Dr Farashuddin, Dr Abdus Samad and Dr Shah Mohammed Farid warned us about getting anything less than a B+. However, Saadat Bhai worked diligently with us, and helped us navigate through our textbook, “Fundamental Methods of Mathematical Economics” by Alpha C. Chiang. Fortunately, his wife Shahana Bhabi, a college professor, was still in Dhaka, and as a bachelor pro-tem, Saadat Bhai was able to dedicate hours on the problem sets. He not only shared his notes with us, he taught us all the tricks he mastered. Whenever we would find a problem that was difficult to solve, and were walking around with a gloomy look, Saadat Bhai would appear with his smiling face, and give his war cry—“Arey, Lagrange maro”—which to our mind, already fatigued by our struggles with optimisation using the Lagrange Method, gave us hope to carry on and not be too doleful.
Whenever I visited Dhaka, either during my long fieldwork in 1981-1983 or subsequently for other reasons, both personal and professional, I would stop by his office or his home for a cup of tea. He offered his unstinted help for my work in Cumilla during his BARD days, and later at ERD, as a brother would. He was a source of strength for me when my elder brother Shadani passed away in 1987 and he was finishing up his dissertation in Boston.
When Saadat Bhai was working at the ERD in 1993-1994, he encouraged me to apply for a UNDP programme known as TOKTEN. The Transfer of Knowledge Through Expatriate Nationals (TOKTEN) programme is a global mechanism funded by the UN for tapping into expatriate nationals who had migrated to other countries and achieved professional success abroad. TOKTEN volunteers were invited by the government of Bangladesh to undertake short-term consultancies. They were not paid direct salaries but were entitled to a roundtrip air ticket and a daily subsistence allowance (DSA). Saadat Bhai connected me with another Boston University alum, Dr Mohiuddin Khan Alamgir, who was then chairman of the Tariff Commission, and the result was a feasibility study of a carbon tax in Bangladesh. My work in 1994 led to my subsequent work a few years later, in 1996, when I was invited by USAID and UNDP to work as an environmental economist for National Environmental Management Action Plan (NEMAP). I owe it to Saadat Bhai for getting me interested in the newly emerging field of environmental economics.
During the years of 2000-2005, when I was working at Harvard University, I visited Bangladesh several times both for professional and personal reasons. His wife, Shahana Bhabi, would invite us to his house in Gulshan every time Rumi came with me to Bangladesh. When I last went to visit him in Niketon, to invite him to my book inauguration, I missed him by a minute as he had already left to see his daughter. I called him on the day of my book launch to remind him. His last words to me during the call was, “Shibli, I will try but as you know, my health does not always want to cooperate with my wishes.”
Saadat Bhai, wherever you are, we will always remember you as a friend. For your warmth. For your wit, affection and, not to mention, your hearty laugh and pithy one-liners.
Dr Abdullah Shibli is an economist and senior research fellow at International Sustainable Development Institute (ISDI), a think tank based in Boston, USA.
