The meeting held at the Cirdap Headquarters in the city, chaired by Cirdap Director General Dr Durga P Paudyal, also selected topics for studies to be undertaken during the next fiscal.

Additional Secretary and National Project Director of LGSP Md Abul Quashem and other senior officials were present in the meeting.

The programme, initiated by Cirdap with the concept developed by Prof Yoshihiro Kaida, an IRD expert, attempts to coordinate the four IRD projects of the government.

The meeting noted that since the '50s, many different field level approaches for poverty alleviation and rural development were adopted in Bangladesh.

But, the meeting pointed out that it had now become necessary to evolve an appropriate model of sustainable development to address the emerging issues in this area through a concerted and integrated approach.

Many organisations that have branched out from the concept of IRD have lost the glory once they enjoyed and the IRD concept itself is now under the microscope, the meeting observed.

At the same time, without the central theme of integration, agriculture and rural development projects tend to become piecemeal and poorly coordinated to each other, the meeting regretted.

Experts observed that as a result, often they were duplicated and redundant or they left some important sectors completely unattended. Although donors tend to finance some of these piecemeal projects, they fail to ensure any meaningful linkage with each other, they added.

Secretaries and policymakers of the concerned rural development, local government and other relevant ministries, project directors and senior officials, various agencies and development partners took part in that seminar.