Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina on Wednesday directed the authorities concerned to form a "panel of expert project directors (PDs)" for checking implementation loopholes in the schemes under development budget.
She also instructed taking up priority projects by keeping aside the less- important ones, Planning Minister Abdus Salam quoted the PM as saying at the third meeting of the Planning Commission (PC).
"The government will even train up the experts in the panel. If any suitable person goes on retirement, the government can pick that person as a PD for the betterment of project execution," he told journalists emerging from the meeting at the Commission office in the city.
Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina is the Chairperson of the nine-member commission that sat after nine years since 2015.
Currently, the government does not have any pool of expert PDs to implement around 1,400 ongoing projects, resulting in time-and cost-overrun.
The planning minister said the PC has decided to recast the existing format, led by the Programming Division member, of the project selection committee for the Annual Development Programme (ADP).
According to the latest decision, all four members of the PC will be included in the selection committee for ensuring quality of the development works.
The PC has also decided to form a foreign-aided project review committee, headed by the Principal Secretary of the Prime Minister's Office (PMO), which will sit every two months to oversee the projects, Mr Samad said.
He said the PC has agreed to expedite implementation of the priority projects with internal resources instead of foreign loans for streamlining the priority works.
When asked about warnings by foreign development partners (DPs) to suspend funding to some projects and programmes, the minister said the administration will not sit idle if they intervene into a democratic government.
"If the DPs warn us, the government will not sit idle. It's a democratically elected government. It has the right to work independently," he said, expressing the government's willingness to work with the DPs together.
Asked about the imbalances in the public investment and the Five Year Plan (FYP), he said: "The PM has instructed us to scrutinise the issues and ensure quality investment and project implementation."
About the slow-moving projects, Mr Samad said the government would not allow delays and would not release funds to those projects. "We've also decided not to give green signal to the projects without enough feasibility study."
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