Election year, but ADP efforts down

Ministries and divisions are lagging in the implementation of the Annual Development Progra-mme (ADP) despite it being an election year.Between July and August, Tk 4,081 crore, or 6.5 percent of the total allocation of Tk 62,435 crore, was spent, according to statistics from the Implemen-tation Monitoring and Evaluation Division (IMED).Though expenditure in some election-oriented projects has increased, the overall expenditure has gone down, a planning ministry official said. Among the 54 ministries and divisions, 22 implemented 0 to 2 percent of their allocations.ADP implementation stood at 8 percent of the allocation in the same period a year ago.Of the amount used in the first two months of fiscal 2013-14, Tk 3,050 crore came from the government’s own fund and Tk 1,031 crore from foreign aid.The local government division and the primary and mass education ministry spent the highest among the 10 large ministries and divisions in the July-August period.“Through these two ministries, schools, small roads, bridges and culverts were built and repaired in the constituencies, and hence expenditure was expedited,” the official said.However, implementation in the big and priority projects is very slow. “Although a couple of power projects in the public sector are going on, the implementation statuses of the rest of the projects are very poor.”In the first two months, the power division’s implementation rate stood at only 2 percent, whereas the rate was 12 percent last year.The bridges division, which got the third highest allocation in the ADP due to the Padma Bridge project, expended only 0.13 percent of its allotment.The health ministry continued with its poor implementation from last fiscal year: in the first two months it used up only 2 percent of its allocation.The roads division implemented only 5 percent of its share, due to no significant progress in many big projects like the Dhaka-Chittagong four-lane highway project.The autonomous bodies managed to utilise only 2 percent of their allocation in the first 2 months of the current fiscal year.