Patterns of Corruption During COVID-19 in Bangladesh

Abstract Corruption during COVID-19 has reached global proportions. During COVID-19, corruption was rampant in numerous nations around the world, especially in the health sector. Bangladesh is not an exception. This paper aims to analyse the various forms and faces of corruption with their frequency levels using AntConc and corpus linguistics analysis, as well as convert all of the data into visual graphics using SPSS and R-Programming. Using related keywords, over 1200 corruption news stories were gathered from a number of national daily newspapers and national television news sources. The analysis begins with COVID-19 by reviewing categorical forms of political corruption and bureaucratic corruption, demonstrating the most essential examples of typologies, establishing corruption levels, and indicating where corruption originated. All analyses in this study, including occurrences, keywords, n-grammes, and concordances, indicate that corruption during COVID-19 was substantial and had a substantial effect on the health sector. Therefore, we begin by identifying corruption month-by-month in both 2020 and 2021. Moreover, we discovered political, bureaucratic, and both types of corruption concurrently during the time period in which all stakeholders benefited from the corrupt transition. Along with bribery and extortion, we found that nepotism, embezzlement, and lobbying were prevalent during the time period. We also discovered statistically significant instances of terms such as 'health,' 'government,' 'corruption, “money/tk,' and 'JKG', which indicate institutional corruption. In addition, while analysing the evidence of corruption frequency in Bangladesh, we discovered that it was symmetrical and unimodal. The average frequency of corruption during COVID-19 in Bangladesh was approximately 70, with a standard deviation of 20. In conclusion, our qualitative analysis identifies three major problems: corruption in the "health" sector, the greed of involved stakeholders, and the incompetence of government officials, which has made governance in Bangladesh more challenging.