A report in the New Nation on Tuesday said discussants in a CPD arranged seminar in the city on the national budget for 2021-22 have suggested that the forthcoming budget should focus on promoting equity, redistribution of income and social justice. Discussants have also laid emphasis on protecting jobs and saving human lives, sufferings from shortage of food, cash and jobs caused by shutdown. We would add to similar recommendations to say that the budget should be pro-people to stimulate their livelihood activities instead of focusing on illusive higher growth on large spending. We would say the budget should earmark enough allocation for small, medium business and agriculture to revive the rural economy. It must provide enough resources to roll out the nationwide vaccination programme.
The new budget with an outlay of over Tk 6.03 trillion is going to be placed before Parliament tomorrow. We would like to say that this must be an implementable budget instead a politically demonstrative huge budget. A big part of big budgets every year remains unutilised in absence of proper institutional capacity plus government inefficiency to use funds. It is noticeable as the CPD has pointed out that only 42 per cent of outgoing budget has been implemented in nine months of fiscal 2020-21 and the rate of implementation was only 50.2 per cent. The ADP implementation was only at 49 per cent in first 10 months while the crucial health sector budget utilisation was only at 31.3 per cent. It is unbelievable. The poor performance was at a time when the nation was severely hit by Covid-19.
As we see, the outgoing budget was severely slashed earlier this year mainly for failing to achieve progress in implementation of projects. So we would say that the government should place a realistic budget that it can implement while placing emphasis on improving institutional capacity and efficiency to manage the budget. Allocations to mega projects must be reduced to make allocations to much needed socioeconomic projects to reach benefits to the common people.
It needs no mention that corruption, irregularities and mismanagement spoil big part of the budget. Government leaders, bureaucrats and contractors launder big part of budget for mega projects. We would say the budget must develop measures to ensure transparency and accountability to check misuse of funds.
