ADP review meeting today

---

FE Report
A high-level review meeting will be held today (Thursday) as the development project implementing agencies in the first quarter of the current fiscal could spend only 10 per cent of the Tk 305 billion allocated under the Annual Development Programme (ADP), officials said Tuesday.
Planning Minister AK Khandakar has asked secretaries of different ministries and divisions to attend the meeting with their respective reports on progress in ADP implementation.
Against the backdrop of poor project implementation,
the planning minister has decided to hold the special meeting with 55 secretaries and representatives of different government agencies in a bid to streamline implementation of the development projects, a senior ministry official told the FE.
"Such a high-level meeting will be the first of its kind in Bangladesh. This will help the government find out the bottlenecks for quick project implementation," he said.
The project implementing agencies could spend only 10 per cent of the ADP budget in the first quarter due to poor performance of top 10 development fund spenders.
The 10 largest fund spending ministries and divisions, which received nearly 80 per cent of the Tk 305 billion development budget, have utilised only 12 per cent of their respective allocations.
The Implementation, Monitoring and Evaluation Division (IMED) in its report said all the government agencies could spend only Tk 31.25 billion in the July-September quarter of the Fiscal Year 2009-2010.
The government has framed the "ambitious" ADP budget for the current fiscal to implement 886 projects in order to build up the country's poor infrastructures and improve social security for adding an impetus to the national economy.