Kazi Zahidul Hasan :Finance Minister AMA Muhith will place the national budget for the fiscal year (FY), 2015-16 before the Jatiya Sangsad (JS) today (Thursday), attaching utmost priority to infrastructure development for attaining a higher economic growth.Since independence, this will be the country’s 44th budget and the 16th of the Awami League (AL) government while the ninth for Muhith.The budget size for the next fiscal is likely to be around Tk 3,00,000 crore (Tk 3 trillion), setting the revenue collection target at Tk 1,80,000 crore.The government’s estimated total earning during the 2015-16 is likely to be Tk 2,14,000 crore. If such an earning target is set by the government, the nation would see a Tk 86,000 crore budget deficit in the next fiscal. The budget, however, try to keep the deficit within 5.0 per cent of the gross domestic product (GDP). To finance the deficit budget, the government plans to borrow near about Tk 52,500 crore from the internal sources, Tk 30,500 crore from foreign sources and Tk 3,000 crore from other sources.”The government will finance the deficit budget mostly from utilizing internal sources, including bank borrowing and the sale of saving certificates, and foreign aid,” a senior finance ministry official told The New Nation on Wednesday.The target for GDP growth is likely to be 7.2 per cent for the upcoming fiscal and the inflation target at 6.5 per cent for the next fiscal.Muhith earlier said that the upcoming budget would lay emphasis on raising the growth of gross domestic product (GDP), maintaining price stability, enhancing the rate of investment, and improving the power and energy, and physical infrastructure further with special attention to human resources development and reducing income disparity to bring more people out of poverty. The government plans to spend Tk 97,000 crore under the next Annual Development Programme (ADP), with higher allocation in transport, power and education sectors.The allocation is 29.33 per cent higher than the revised ADP of the current fiscal year, and 20.77 per cent higher than the original ADP of the current fiscal.The ADP is likely to give priority to the development of the country’s mega projects, including the Padma Multipurpose Bridge (PMB).Officials familiar with budget preparation said that the next budget will also focus on poverty reduction initiatives, with substantial rise in allocations for rural employment generation and social safety-net programmes. They added that as the poverty rate already fell below 20.0 per cent, the next budget is likely to adopt various fiscal policies to make Bangladesh poverty-free in near future.The original size of the outgoing fiscal’s budget is Tk 2,50,506 crore while it was Tk 2,22,491 crore in the previous fiscal. While talking to this correspondent, economists recommended for addressing some key issues in the FY2016 budget. They put the suggestions to implement different reform initiatives to enhance capacity of the budget implementing agencies and stop the misuse of public funds.”We need an investment friendly and pro-people budget in which the government must adopt reforms in various areas for its smooth implementation,” Dr AB Mirza Azizul Islam, former finance adviser of the caretaker told The New Nation. He said, the ADP implementation performance of the different government agencies is not satisfactory, which should be improved,”Reforms will also be made in tax policies for collecting more revenues. Budgetary measures should also be taken to stimulate private investment which remained sluggish for the last few years,” he noted.
