The project aims to reduce critical and acute malnutrition, particularly among women and children, in 105 upazilas with consequent fall in incidence of low birth weight, anaemia, goitre and night blindness, officials said.

Some 2.5 lakh community nutrition organisers and promoters, volunteers and field officers are involved in the project.

The Executive Committee of the National Economic Council (Ecnec) took three years to approve the final design of the project due to disagreements with the World Bank (WB), a major financier of the project, stalling its implementation, officials at the NNP and the WB said.

The WB and project officials still differ on final selection of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to work on seven area packages (APs) out of 23. The other 16 APs cleared by the WB have been awaiting approval of the health ministry for about three months, the officials said.

Moreover, the NGOs that participated in the Bangladesh Integrated Nutrition Project (BINP) have refused to work on the project unless they got their outstanding bills settled.

Against this backdrop, the WB withdrew Tk 150 crore from the project funds in February this year.

"We made formal requests to the World Bank to clear all the APs at a time as agreed in the original deed document. But it has requested the NNP to form a special committee to re-evaluate the rest seven APs, further delaying the process," said Dr Anisul Awal, director of Programme Support and Technical Unit of the NNP.

A decision on formation of such a committee is awaiting approval of the health ministry, he added.

Awal also mentioned the most important task of the project, baseline survey on the NNP prior to its implementation, has not even started although it was supposed to be complete way back.

Sundararajan Srinivasa Gopalan, task leader of the NNP at the WB, said, "There are several reasons for the delay. In June 2002, reiterated its position on hiring of the NNP staff. In September, a new leadership at the bank agreed to all the Ecnec decisions and finally the deadlock was over."

"This paved the way for the government to formally approve the NNP in December 2002 and so, the implementation of NNP actually began in January 2003."

But Health Minister Khandaker Mosharraf Hossain told The Daily Star, "The NNP has made no progress in the last three years and I am not satisfied with it at all. We have decided to integrate the NNP with the health, nutrition and population sector programme (HNPSP) we are expecting to launch it shortly."

About the delay in approval, the minister said, "The row was over fixing wages of the NNP officials. We disagreed to have two different types of wages for officials working in the same project."