Curbing politically-motivated projects

Undue pressure on the Planning Commission (PC) to take up projects at the fag end of a fiscal year (FY) is no new phenomenon in the country. This year, this practice, mostly politically motivated, has reportedly assumed a stupendous surge rendering the step-by-step procedural requirements of the PC almost redundant. The irony is that at a time when the commission is worried about the execution of its already approved projects, intrusion of new and unapproved proposals is sure to stoke up indiscipline, albeit unruliness in the entire scheme of things.
In the face of severe pressure, the PC is not reportedly in a position to judge the merit of the projects. The perspectives that drive the priority of development projects at the national level are for obvious reasons wide-ranging, meant to reflect national policies and their essential linkages to factors spurring development. Unfortunate as it is, this very objective is nullified for the most part when it comes to rashly approved ones in total disregard to the norms governing the execution of development projects. A number of projects have already been taken up the PC under the influence of political and partisan and several more are in the process of being approved. Worse still is the alleged perception that a good number of these lateral entries do not deserve to be included in the PC's agenda at the moment, given the dearth of funds that has forced downsizing of the current fiscal's Annual Development Programme (ADP). To accommodate the new entries, it is likely that works for some of the planned projects would either be scaled down or get dropped.
Ideally, the PC should be free from such untoward pressures, but the reality is otherwise. ADP projects are meant to reflect the national development strategy, focusing on poverty alleviation, investment, education, human resource development etc. There should, therefore, be no scope for botched-up activities in the name of development projects.  
Concerned quarters find this an ominous sign, not just confined within itself, as the practice leads to poor execution and monitoring of projects as a whole by the implementing agencies, on the one hand, and on the other, it encourages government departments too in having a lot of their projects included at the eleventh hour without proper scrutiny. It has been reported that the Local Government Engineering Department (LGED) has recently sent nearly 50-60 such projects to the local government ministry for obtaining approval of the Executive Committee of the National Economic Council (ECNEC). Reports indicate that the practice is not limited to small projects only. Projects as big as amounting to Tk 4.0 billion and more have been approved in no time without the required scrutiny.
The reason why such practice warrants bad consequences is the blatant rejection of policy discipline in that it invalidates the functioning of the state in executing its decisions as planned. Since the ministry of planning is responsible for designing a systematically planned sequence of activities throughout the year, especially as regards the ADP, it should be no one else's business to get in the way of its course of action. Otherwise, the casualty, hardly will any one disagree, is the very essence of governance.