Despite rise, ADP spend to miss target
The government is set to miss the development spending target despite a 21.28 percent year-on-year rise in such spending in the first 11 months of 2018-19.
The government will have to spend five times more—Tk 56,577 crore—in June than its monthly average of Tk 10,913 crore to reach the target of the Annual Development Programme (ADP) for the full fiscal year.
Between July and May, ministries and divisions expended Tk 120,043 crore, up from Tk 98,978 crore in the same period a year ago, according to data from the Implementation Monitoring and Evaluation Division of the planning ministry.
Planning Minister MA Mannan reviewed the progress in the development spending yesterday at a meeting with the officials of ministries and divisions, instructing them to be more sincere about implementation.
The priority for the government is to end corruption in the implementation of projects and accelerate the pace of execution, he said at the meeting at the auditorium of the National Economic Council at the Planning Commission in Dhaka.
“I hope you will be careful about it and help implement the ADP quickly,” the minister said.
The ADP implementation scenario, however, has changed from what it was at the beginning of the fiscal year.
It picked up in November amid the fervour surrounding the parliamentary polls in December.
A planning ministry official said the finance and planning ministries took some measures in the beginning of 2018-19 to boost the spending and the measures started to bear fruit from November.
Since November, the expenditure has averaged more than Tk 12,000 crore per month in contrast to Tk 6,216 crore posted every month in the preceding four months.
In June last year, the finance division empowered project directors, giving them authority to release funds in the first two quarters of a fiscal year by themselves instead of waiting for approval from ministries or divisions, an exercise that takes up two to three months.
The top ADP performer was the power division, which spent 79.64 percent of the allocation, followed by the Prime Minister’s Office 79.25 percent, the science and technology ministry 78.89 percent, the primary and mass education ministry 73.54 percent, and the shipping ministry 72.75 percent.
Among the poor performers, the public security division managed to spend 23.07 percent, followed by the railways ministry 44.68 percent, the secondary and higher education division 53.87 percent, the water resources ministry 59.41 percent and the bridges division 64.51 percent.
