THE government is going to empower ministers with the authority of approving investment projects costing up to Tk 25 crore under the annual development programme despite opposition from the Planning Ministry officials. It can be seen a good arrangement for sharing commission business. Investments will be made on the assurance of good infrastructure available in the country and not who says what.
‘Though the initiative is being taken to save time and make the project approval process easier, the move to allow ministers to approve development projects will interfere with the discipline in public expenditure,’ said a Planning Ministry official. The decision will also weaken the Planning Commission and may create scope for misuse of public money, he said.
It has been a tradition for the successive governments in Bangladesh to get in a hurry to spend the ADP funds in the last few months, especially the second half of a fiscal year. This is nothing new. But such hasty implementation does not ensure the quality and good governance of the development projects. A hurried execution also increases the project cost. It also affects the development projects with delays and incompetence.
In the event of a significant shortfall in achieving the revenue target, the government goes to raise borrowing or downsize the ADP, the latter being the common practice in recent years, which results in a waste of resources due to abruptly stopping the flow of funds to ongoing projects. The quality of the ADP, already burdened with low-priority projects, is compromised further with the inclusion of a large number of new projects. Added to this, an oversized ADP would result in resources being dispersed over a large number of projects, resulting in delayed implementation and a consequent wastage of resources.
In order to inject fresh momentum to the pace of implementation, experts have suggested appointment of project directors from the private sector. ADP allocation in Bangladesh is very small in terms of the GDP and even the present allocation cannot be used because of the poor capacities of the ministries and divisions.
Thus we can see that instead of appointing project directors from the private sector to ensure that the projects were being implemented efficiently the government chooses to allocate more power to the ministers to ensure that the ADP targets are met. This will only make the ministers and their cronies more happy as it will enable them to give projects to the selected few who are their supporters and thus enable them to line their projects at the expense of the exchequer. Implementation rates of projects approved by ECNEC are bad enough – ranging from 77 to 91 percent – if projects are approved by ministers who think of the money as largesse to be given out to their supporters then the quality and implementation of projects will fall further. This is a bad idea.
