The meeting, an extended one, of the Planning Commission was held at the National Economic Council (NEC), with Prime Minister Khaleda Zia in the chair. It finalised the revision of the current fiscal year's ADP, which now amounts to Tk 19,000 crore instead of the initial sum of Tk 20,300 crore. The meeting also set the next fiscal year's ADP at Tk 21,500 crore.

The NEC will approve this year's revised ADP in a meeting on May 19 and the next year's ADP on May 29.

At the meeting, the planning ministry observed that lawmakers were wont to make unrealistic public promises which if added up would come to four to five times the size of an ADP. "If all their pledges are summed up, it would cost between Tk 80,000 crore to Tk 100,000 crore," it noted.

According to the ministry's working paper tabled before the prime minister, the ADP tends towards a 'development through construction of roads, bridges, culverts, buildings etc' by accommodating the parliamentarians' pressure and demands to realise their public commitments. Instead, the ADP should be oriented to poverty alleviation, development of human resources, agriculture and irrigation, and railways and riverine communications, the paper maintained.

The meeting also reviewed the progress of ADP implementation in the current fiscal year. Like the previous fiscal year's, it found only 45 percent of the ADP being implemented in the first nine months of this year. It indicates that the strategies adopted by the government last year to accelerate ADP implementation has failed to deliver, meeting sources said.

Of the 44 ministries and divisions which implement the ADP, the post and telecommunication ministry performed the worst during the period with only a 14-percent implementation achieved. Six other ministries carried out less than 20 percent of their allocations, sources remarked.

Meeting sources said Khaleda expressed sharp dissatisfaction and reproved a number of ministries for lagging far behind their targets in executing the ADP.

Asking the sluggish ministries to speed up ADP operations, Khaleda even advised the secretaries concerned to take orientation courses to improve their efficiency.

In July-March period, ADP implementation by eight ministries ranged between 21 and 30 percent, nine ministries between 31 and 40 percent and 20 ministries achieved more than 45 percent implementation.

The local government division has topped the list with a 68-percent implementation.

Other fairly good performers are: Energy and Mineral Division (54 percent), communications ministry (54 percent), health and family planning ministry (51 percent), agriculture ministry (51 percent), fisheries and livestock ministry (49 percent), Rural Development and Co-operatives Division (48 percent), primary and mass education ministry (46 percent) and education ministry (45 percent).

The yesterday's meeting generated some new policies including simplifying administrative procedures and chalked out some strategies to accelerate ADP implementation from the next fiscal year.

To simplify administrative procedures, the meeting decided to use a single document christened 'Development Project Pro-forma (DPP)' for investment projects instead of the existing duo of Project Concept Paper and Project Proposal. The DPP will have two chapters instead of the existing eight, require information on 30 items instead of 67 and contain four tables and three annexes instead of nine and seven respectively.

Emerging from the meeting, Finance Minister Saifur Rahman said, "No project will be revised more than once. If any office seeks repeated revision of a project, that has to be placed before the NEC."

Explaining the sloth of ADP implementation, Saifur said, "Due to conditions of donors [that we could not implement], the project aid flow was lesser than usual."

The size of this year's ADP initially was Tk 20,300 crore, of which Tk 11,816 crore was envisaged to come from local currency and Tk 8,484 crore from project aid. In the nine months to March 2004, the government has utilised Tk 9,189 crore or 50 percent of the local currency allocation, of which LCC money was Tk 5,852 crore. Of the project aid by donors 39 percent or Tk 3,337 crore has been used.