Annual Development Programme (ADP) slowdown annoys the government and prompts it to direct top ministries to expedite project execution, officials said Tuesday.
During the July-October period of the current FY2023, the ministries and agencies implemented merely 12.64 per cent of the Tk2.56-trillion development recipe, Implementation Monitoring and Evaluation Division (IMED) data show.
In the same period last fiscal year (FY2022)-though rather slow then, too-the government agencies executed 13.06 per cent of the Tk2.25 trillion ADP.
Planning Minister MA Mannan sat with 15 secretaries and high executives of the agencies and projects for stocktaking and sought explanation regarding the slow pace of the national-priority development projects, the sources said.
"The planning minister has asked the ministries to expedite the project execution amid the slower progress during this post-Covid period," a senior Planning Commission (PC) official told the FE.
Secretaries from different ministries and divisions, including Roads and Highways Division, Railway Ministry, Shipping Ministry, Power Division, Energy Division, Tourism and Civil Aviation Ministry, Education Ministry, Health Ministry and Water Resources Ministry, were present at the meeting.
Their execution performances during July-October period under review were lower than that in the same period last fiscal year (FY 2021-22).
A senior PC official said the ministries and agencies performed bleak in the first four months of the current fiscal although the Covid impact has already been over.
"It is unfortunate that the project-implementation capacity of the ministries is not improving over the years, even after millions of dollars spent on their training and study tours home and abroad," he says.
Another PC official informs that they made a list of highly important and poorly performing projects of the ministries and placed before the meeting on Tuesday.
"The planning minister asked the secretaries, agency chiefs and the Project Directors to account for the delays and poor performance of the projects. The authorities explained their status. Then the ministries asked them to expedite the execution," he says.
Among many projects, the PC gave a presentation on the slow and struggling BRT project from Airport to Gazipur of the Roads and Highways Division, Cox's Bazar airport-development project of the Civil Aviation Ministry, and 70 locomotive procurement of railway ministry.
"We hope this meeting will help streamline execution of the nearly 1700 ongoing development projects under the Tk2.56 trillion ADP," the PC official adds.
kabirhumayan10@gmail.com