The planning ministry will table this proposal for the prime minister's approval today.

The proposed ADP contains a local currency contribution of Tk 14,325 crore and a foreign component of Tk 7,150 crore.

The new ADP heavily emphasises transport and power sectors as each got 16 percent of the total allocation. It will be followed by the education sector with a 14 percent share.

The foreign currency component has been envisaged lower than last year's Tk 8,484 crore. This reduction was made as the government has been unable to utilise foreign aid due to various reasons, including donors' conditions, inefficiency in project implementation, a new procurement policy and bureaucratic bottlenecks.

According to the latest data of the Economic Relations Division (ERD), $6.2 billion in foreign aid is now piled up in the pipeline.

Meantime, this year's ADP was revised down to Tk 18,934 crore from Tk 20,300 crore in April. But now the planning ministry has estimated the figure at Tk 19,000 crore with Tk 12,000 crore in local component and the rest in foreign currency.

About the last minute enhancement, a planning ministry source said, "The local component utilisation has increased recently. This is why we believe the final ADP implementation figure will be better than what we thought in April."

Only 36 percent of this year's ADP has been utilised in the first eight months of the current fiscal year. Utilisation of local currency component is 42 percent compared with only 30 percent of project aid utilisation.

The World Bank in its Bangladeshi Quarterly Update of April, 2004, wrote, "The slow pace of development spending is primarily due to weak implementation capacity and poor disbursement of the foreign aid component."

"Every year the government chalks out an ambitious ADP and then revises it due to poor implementation," said a source.