To tell the truth our development budget has already become stuck up to several big projects as the government is increasingly showing the inclination to big expenditures to make development work visible politically. Vested quarters are interested to promote such projects, which have the bigger potential to generate more ill-gotten fortune to people from construction contracts and writing the expenditure bills. Many now seek to evaluate mega projects as a way to mega corruption in the government.
There is no doubt such projects are necessary, mainly in the infrastructure domain but what is at stake is hasty approval of the projects without developing the efficiency and capacity of the government machinery to properly implement them and the consequences that may result from it. It has created the big mess in our budgetary system. Now we have lesser available funds in the budget after meeting the needs of the big projects to promote other socio-economic development under the Annual Development Programmes.
It appears that the Padma Multipurpose Bridge was initially estimated at a cost of Tk 772 crore but it may now go beyond Tk 28 thousand crore at the end. The cost of Moghbazar-Mouchak flyover has increased several times and the project implementation now at 60 percent level to suggest more cost and time overrun are on card. The deadline of Dhaka-Chittagong four-lane highway was extended four times from 2012, so also the Dhaka-Mymensingh highways saw huge escalation of cost to name a few.
The government has over a dozen mega projects in hands but without proper cost estimation of these projects before they are undertaken and their funding properly arranged, they may cause bigger setback to the economy at the end. But projects such as deep sea port, metro rail, nuclear power plant, Dhaka Elevated Expressway, dredging of 53 river routes, coal-fired power plants, LPG terminal are big projects but without efficiency and their honest implementation where is the guarantee that the projects once completed will remain useful.
What is most important the mega projects must not be objects of mega profit for the contractors when the country’s economy is in doldrums, the government is disorganised and corruption is omnipresent. The big question is how mega projects will help the ordinary people’s life and living.
