During the July–January fiscal year of 2023–24, Bangladesh had a 27 percent implementation rate of the annual development program (ADP), the lowest in the preceding 12 years.
The bleak outlook for ADP implementation is mostly due to a lack of resources and capacity constraints.
Concerned officials stated that the current fiscal year’s income collection did not meet expectations, which led to a decrease in the amount of government funding allocated to the ADP initiatives.
Just 25% of government allotment was spent in the first seven months of the year, demonstrating the government’s continued austerity in expenditure. Conversely, there was a rise in project aid spending of over 30%. They pointed out that throughout the past two years, this pattern has been steady.
The implementation, monitoring, and evaluation division (IMED) of the planning ministry reports that the overall amount spent on ADP implementations from July to January was Tk 744.64 billion, even though the total amount of ADP, including autonomous entities, is Tk 2746.74 billion. The planning ministry’s ADP size for these is Tk 2630 billion.
There are 1,392 projects total in the current ADP.
In the current state of ADP implementation, IMED officials feel that there is no other option than to reduce the ADP allocations. As a result, the ADP will initially be lowered by Tk 180 billion.
ADP implementations are hampered by two major problems, according to Towfiqul Islam Khan, a researcher at the Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD): infrastructure constraints and a lack of resources.
The National Board of Revenue’s (NBR) tax and revenue collections fell short of expectations. Capacity constraints include the incapacity to carry out projects, land-related legal challenges, and terms of foreign loans. Accordingly, he claimed, project implementation in Bangladesh has always been sluggish.
The CPD researcher also observed that this year’s ADP allocations were subject to restrictions, which caused project execution to go slowly.
