Last-hours ADP spending trend hangs on
Saturday, 7 July 2007
The trend of spending the Annual Development Programme (ADP) funds in the last hours of the government has seen no shift even with the caretaker administration, according to government statistics, reports bdnews24.com.
The current caretaker government has trimmed the ADP size to Tk 216 billion from the original Tk 260 billion for the fiscal 2006-2007.
Only Tk 132 billion or 61 per cent of the Tk 216 billion revised ADP outlay has been spent in the first 11 months of the last fiscal year, Planning Commission statistics revealed.
It means the interim government could have fulfilled the target had it spent Tk 83.94 billion alone in June.
Of the Tk 132.06 billion expenditure, Tk 42.93 billion was spent by the immediate past BNP-led alliance government in the first three months of the FY 2006-07.
The statistics showed that five ministries and divisions spent major portion of the total expenditure.
The Local Government Division spent Tk 39.867 billion, communications ministry Tk 16.513 billion, primary and mass education Tk 13.292 billion, health and family welfare Tk 10.982 billion and power division Tk 18.94 billion, according to planning commission data.
The spending was 63.29 per cent for the same period of FY 2005-06, the statistics showed.
Development partners and lending agencies, including the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, and economists have long been blaming governments for its spending spree at the fag end of the fiscal year.
Hossain Zillur Rahman, an economist and one of the main architects of the donors-pushed Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper, said the spending extravaganza in the last hours erodes the quality of development works.
He said the government was concentrating more on fighting corruption than other serious issues that need to be addressed.
"Building implementation capacity of the administration is much bigger an issue than corruption," Rahman told news agency Thursday.
Earlier in February, finance adviser AB Mirza Azizul Islam told reporters that the implementation of the annual programme suffered a setback because of the political unrest in October-December over electoral reforms.
Two other major problems the adviser identified were failure of authorities in proper selection of the projects and inadequate inflow of foreign aid as against commitments.
According to official data, some 886 projects were included in the just concluded ADP, of those 43 are new.
The current caretaker government has trimmed the ADP size to Tk 216 billion from the original Tk 260 billion for the fiscal 2006-2007.
Only Tk 132 billion or 61 per cent of the Tk 216 billion revised ADP outlay has been spent in the first 11 months of the last fiscal year, Planning Commission statistics revealed.
It means the interim government could have fulfilled the target had it spent Tk 83.94 billion alone in June.
Of the Tk 132.06 billion expenditure, Tk 42.93 billion was spent by the immediate past BNP-led alliance government in the first three months of the FY 2006-07.
The statistics showed that five ministries and divisions spent major portion of the total expenditure.
The Local Government Division spent Tk 39.867 billion, communications ministry Tk 16.513 billion, primary and mass education Tk 13.292 billion, health and family welfare Tk 10.982 billion and power division Tk 18.94 billion, according to planning commission data.
The spending was 63.29 per cent for the same period of FY 2005-06, the statistics showed.
Development partners and lending agencies, including the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, and economists have long been blaming governments for its spending spree at the fag end of the fiscal year.
Hossain Zillur Rahman, an economist and one of the main architects of the donors-pushed Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper, said the spending extravaganza in the last hours erodes the quality of development works.
He said the government was concentrating more on fighting corruption than other serious issues that need to be addressed.
"Building implementation capacity of the administration is much bigger an issue than corruption," Rahman told news agency Thursday.
Earlier in February, finance adviser AB Mirza Azizul Islam told reporters that the implementation of the annual programme suffered a setback because of the political unrest in October-December over electoral reforms.
Two other major problems the adviser identified were failure of authorities in proper selection of the projects and inadequate inflow of foreign aid as against commitments.
According to official data, some 886 projects were included in the just concluded ADP, of those 43 are new.