It is quite logical to raise a few questions about the government's annual development programme (ADP). The questions relate to its size and quality of projects included for implementation. Despite being forced to trim the ADP in the second half of every fiscal year (FY), the government continues to increase its size along with inclusion of more and more new projects. The ADP for the upcoming FY will also be no exception. The National Economic Council (NEC) last Thursday approved the ADP for the FY 2018-19 that, in terms of resource allocation, is respectively 10 per cent and 17 per cent bigger than original and revised versions of ADP for the current FY (2017-18).
The availability of resources has never been a problem for execution of the right kind of public sector development programmes. Rather, lack of capacity on the part of the agencies on this account has been listed as the number one factor that forces the government to downsize the ADPs. There are, however, other factors that tend to slow down the execution of various public sector development projects. The trend is amply manifested in the very unimpressive rate of ADP implementation until the third-quarter of any FY. The ADP implementation rate hardly exceeds 35 to 40 per cent at the end of the third quarter. But the rate scales up to around 90 to 95 per cent at the end of final quarter. Yet again, there has been implementation shortfall in terms of the revised ADP, in its financial size, at the end of the FY in recent times.
Meanwhile, there has been growing scepticism about the unusual speed of project execution in the final months of a fiscal year. But no satisfactory answers have come forth from the relevant quarters. There is no denying that the government has speeded up the rate of implementation of some priority infrastructure projects in recent years. But the overall picture relating to the execution of ADP has not changed much. The build-up of unspent project assistance fund is a pointer to this fact. The project assistance, coming from external sources, now in the pipeline is estimated to be around $23 to $24 billion.
The inclusion of a large number of unapproved projects in the ADP, primarily, on political considerations, remains yet another sore point in development planning. As projects of this category are carried forward from one FY to another with little or no allocation, they face both cost overrun and lengthy execution period. However, a number of regular projects, including the large infrastructural ones, do also have similar deficiencies.
Thus, the current state of affairs as regards execution of development programmes needs to be streamlined. Instead of playing to the gallery, the government should prepare ADPs realistically. It should take up projects keeping its eye on the available resources. In addition, there should be serious efforts on its part to raise the capacity of the agencies involved in development project execution. Once that is done, there would hopefully be some improvements in the situation about use of external project assistance also.
