The problems that the Planning Commission usually faces in the second half of every financial year have surfaced, again, this year, perhaps in a more intensified form.
The Commission would soon have to trim the annual development programme (ADP) and include a few more unapproved development projects in it -- an exercise that it detests most.
It now plans to downsize the ADP for the current fiscal by Tk 80-Tk 100 billion, mainly because of an unusually slowed-down rate of implementation of development projects in the first half of the fiscal 2013-14. The political unrest is being largely blamed for the poor rate of implementation -- at only 20 per cent during the first five months of the current fiscal.
There is no denying that the rate of development project execution in the first half of the present fiscal is, at least, 10 to 15 per cent less than that of the corresponding period of the previous fiscals.
The violence-prone political programmes centering the recently-held general elections caused serious disruptions to normal transportation of goods and construction materials and usual economic activities for the last couple of months. This development had surely affected the development works in the public sector.
However, the level of competence and efficiency of personnel concerned in the government agencies, as far as the execution of development projects is concerned, has always been well below the requirement. This has perennially affected the implementation of the public sector development projects. Besides, the failure to meet the conditions set in the cases with donor-financed projects, causes, on occasions, delays in project implementation.
The Planning Commission has learnt to live with the implementation-related problems. But what has been annoying it is the unrelenting pressure to include unapproved yet politically motivated projects in the ADP. The accommodation of such projects does not only result in the diversion of resources from the approved projects to unapproved and unnecessary ones but also give rise to serious complications for their implementation.
A total of 662 unapproved projects, according to a newspaper report, are already there in the current fiscal's ADP and no allocation was made against such projects. However, 68 from amongst those projects have, in the meanwhile, been approved and the same would be included in the revised ADP as regular projects. What is worse is that nearly 100 more unapproved projects have recently been sent by different ministries to the Planning Commission for inclusion in the revised ADP for the on-going fiscal year.
Most of the unapproved projects are usually pushed by the influential political quarters. To keep the same quarters happy in one way or other, the government initially includes the projects in the ADP but does hardly make any allocations against the same. And if the pressure is too intense, it makes paltry allocations against a few of the projects, by slashing a part of the allocations made to regular and approved ones.
The public expenditure review commission, formed a few years back, had recommended for non-inclusion of unapproved projects in the ADP for the sake of maintaining discipline in the development project execution. The successive governments, in principle, have endorsed the recommendation, but none of them has ever initiated any serious effort to stop this highly irregular practice.
Now, a new government and a new parliament are in place following the general elections, held on January 05 last. The government has new ministers and the parliament, many new members. The possibility of increased pressure coming from such new functionaries including, among others, fresh elected members of parliament to include many more new development projects in their respective constituencies, cannot be ruled out. They could, however, be restrained from making such demands until the end of this fiscal. But, in all probability, the pressure would be quite strong during the formulation of the next ADP by the Planning Commission.
But is it that difficult to stop the inclusion of unapproved projects in the ADP, if the government really means business? This kind of indiscipline in development project management takes place because the relevant agencies have been giving the scope to the concerned quarters for indulgence in such irrational practices. More importantly, the incidence of wastage and misappropriation of resources in the case of projects pushed by the politically influential quarters is usually more than the normal ones.
The ministry concerned and the Executive Committee of the National Economic Council (ECNEC) should make a firm decision about stopping the inclusion of unapproved projects in the ADP for the sake of maintaining discipline in development planning and public resource management.
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