It is unfortunate, to say that at least 17 ministries could not spend even one per cent of the allocation from the budget for the fiscal year 2022-23 in July and August. The foreign, youth and sports, and home ministry’s Public Security Division could not spend anything at all. A media report, quoting the latest data of the IMED, said some Tk 18.78 billion has been allocated for 30 projects of these ministries and departments.
Since the Implementation, Monitoring and Evaluation Division (IMED) of the planning ministry lambasts that a lack of good governance is undermining the potential of public infrastructure projects (PIPs), there is no scope to term these failures as the propaganda of the oppositions or the cooked stories made up by the media. Why do the ministries remain asleep from the beginning of the fiscal year? When will they wake up? We seem to be quite adept at putting obstacles in the way of public projects, and then coming up with various excuses to justify it. However, for this we are not taken by surprise.
As usual, during the last fiscal year, implementation of development projects also goes hurriedly at the fag-end of the fiscal year (May-June) without considering the quality of work. Though the executing agencies were asked for complete their tender, processing, procurement and other works in time, in most cases, those fail, resulting in the lower execution in ten months (July-April). During these months, the ministries and departments had executed only 4.91 per cent per month on average.
Experts observe that a project starts to flounder right from the beginning with inaccurate plans and design, triggering chain of disruptive sequences that continue until the very end. Such poor management of PIPs is frequently by design, enabling corruption, and because of incompetence. Projects executed in such a way are more likely to negatively affect the expected results as well as the return on investment. Besides, it is also draining of valuable local and foreign currencies. They further pointed out that physical, social and digital infrastructures will play crucial role in facilitating Bangladesh’s graduation from a Least Developed Country to a Developing Country. So, how we perform in executing our infrastructure projects will hugely impact our future trajectory as a nation.
Steps must be taken against those who are responsible for the delays in project implementations. Otherwise, if these projects are completed in haste at the fag-end of the fiscal year, not only will national resources be wasted, the people for whom these projects were meant for would not get any benefits.
