A year ago, after a long illness, S M Kamal died. His name will mean little to most people now working in the industry he helped create, which is the point of this piece.
The outline of the life was set down when he died and does not need restating here: a Faridpur childhood, the first MBA cohort out of Dhaka University's Institute of Business Administration, and a job at IBM in 1968 — which in that decade was an exit route most of his contemporaries would have taken. He came home instead. He founded the Bangladesh Computer Samity and was its first president, and later served as president of BASIS as well, one of very few to have led both.
What a biography compresses into a sentence is the thirty years in the middle, and that is the subject here: not who he was, but what he actually changed, and why nobody can see it.
The three campaigns, and what each one did
A colleague who wrote the first book about him recalls the long campaigns. Each sounds like administrative detail. Each decided something.
Import duty on computers. A computer is an imported good, and a high duty does not raise its price by a few per cent — it multiplies it. The practical consequence was that a machine affordable to a middle-class family abroad was a luxury purchase here, which meant the people who would have become programmers never touched one. Duty on computers is therefore not a trade question but an education question with a decade-long delay built into it: the price of a PC in one year decides who is skilled ten years later. Getting it withdrawn is the least visible and most consequential item on this list.
An operating system in the school curriculum. Easy to misread as vendor favouritism, and worth taking on its own terms. Before it, computer education in schools was abstract — the theory of a machine students had no access to and could not operate. Teaching the system they would actually meet in an office turned a subject you passed into a skill you had. The general principle is the useful part: a curriculum that teaches a concept without the tool produces graduates who can describe work they cannot do, and employers notice long before a ministry does.
Permission for VSAT satellite internet. The most technical and the most far-reaching. Before Bangladesh connected to a submarine cable, the only route to international bandwidth was satellite — expensive, limited and tightly controlled. While private satellite links were not permitted there could be no independent internet service providers, and without providers there could be no data-entry industry, no outsourcing, no email-based trade. Permitting VSAT did not make the internet cheap. It made it possible to sell, which is the step that creates a market where none existed.
Why a trade body was the instrument
Why did a man who wanted a computer industry spend his life on associations rather than building a company?
A ministry drafting policy needs someone to consult. Where no industry body exists that role falls to whoever is in the room — a single large importer, a foreign vendor with a Dhaka office, or nobody, in which case the rules are written by people who have never used the product. The effect is less corruption than absence: policy gets made that no practitioner would have written, and is then difficult to unmake.
An association changes that by creating a standing counterparty with a mandate. It is slow, unglamorous work with no equity in it, and in a young economy it is frequently the binding constraint — not capital, not talent, but the absence of anyone the state can negotiate with.
Which is why each campaign above took years. Every one meant meetings with bureaucrats and ministers who did not see the point, and most of those meetings went badly. The younger people in the room, his colleague admits, lost their tempers and gave up. Kamal kept his temper, kept his aim, and came back the next week.
Why this kind of work disappears
Neither the industry nor the state gave him the recognition his work earned while he was alive, and there is a structural reason for that beyond ingratitude.
Infrastructure work is invisible by construction. A founder who builds a successful company has a company with their name on it. A person who gets a duty withdrawn has produced an absence — a cost that no longer exists — and nobody can point at an absence. The benefit is real, diffuse, and accrues to people who never learn it was arranged.
The same asymmetry explains why policy work is chronically under-supplied everywhere. The returns are large, delayed, shared with competitors who did nothing, and impossible to claim credit for. It is the kind of thing that gets done by people who were not expecting credit, which is a thin basis on which to run an industry's relationship with its government.
What is worth doing about it
The tax-free laptop, the software export figure a ministry quotes, the trade body a minister must meet: these are his infrastructure, and the country walks on it without knowing whose it is.
The useful response is not a prize. It is a record. The people who sat in those meetings in the 1980s and 1990s are now in their seventies and eighties, and almost none of what they did exists in writing outside a handful of memoirs. The decisions are documented as outcomes — a duty rate changed, a licence category created — with no account of who argued for them or what the argument was. That is recoverable now and will not be in ten years.
A year after his death, that is the practical thing worth saying: the recognition is owed, and the record is a better memorial than the recognition, because it can still be collected from people who were there.
