DHAKA, Sept 1, 2025 (BSS) - Professor Rehman Sobhan, chairman of the Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD), today urged the civil society to rise above fragmented efforts and take collective responsibility for ensuring meaningful reforms.

"If you had any reforms that you wish to implement presumably this should have been articulated six months ago," he said while chairing the citizen dialogue at a hotel in the city. 

The event, organised by the Citizen's Platform for SDGs, Bangladesh, marked the launch of a new platform titled Bangladesh Reform Watch.

Rehman Sobhan said exercising a watch function is not just about documenting which reforms should go ahead but also about tracking how they are progressing and mobilising citizens to demand accountability.

Reflecting on Bangladesh's 54-year history, he said that the absence of a credible reform process results from the inability of parliament to effectively debate, legislate, and monitor reforms.

This gap, he said, has forced civil society to assume a role it has not yet been able to fulfill.

"There is in a way no such thing as a functioning collective of civil society coming together to generate collective action in support of a reform process," he said.

He urged onn-governmental organizations (NGOs) and Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) to break out of their silos and mobilise citizens at the grassroots level.

"Until we demonstrate this capacity for collective action and our capacity to mobilise people not just to come and participate occasionally in seminars and dialogues but actually in each district … I am not really sure that we will have delivered what we set out to do."

Drawing on his own experience from the pre-independence era, Rehman reminded the audience that civil society once played a transformative role in shaping the Six-Point Movement, which became the foundation for Bangladesh's liberation struggle.

"Six points did not drop from the sky -- it was the end product of civil society initiatives, mostly teachers and academics coming together," he said.

He called on the new platform and civil society at large to take on this historic responsibility: "You have to commit yourself to a process which takes you out of the seminar rooms and makes you into a major political and social resource to take Bangladesh forward."

Dr Debapriya Bhattacharya, CPD Distinguished Fellow; Dr Mustafizur Rahman, another CPD Distinguished Fellow; Dr Selim Raihan, Executive Director of SANEM; and Towfiqul Islam Khan, CPD Additional Research Director also spoke on the occasion.

In his inaugural remarks, Towfiqul Islam Khan said the Citizen’s Platform will formulate a people-oriented manifesto by drawing directly from citizens’ expectations. 

The aim of this platform is to align political parties’ manifestos with the aspirations of the people, he added.