Muhith upset over slow pace
Finance Minister AMA Muhith yesterday expressed unhappiness over the falling implementation rate of the budget over the years, saying it gave a “very bad signal” on the government's capacity.
“We are being made aware of it now,” he told a pre-budget discussion organised by Bangladesh Study Trust (BST) at National Press Club in Dhaka.
He said the government initiated many plans and programmes to enhance the implementation capacity but those were not yielding effective results.
“For example, I have been talking about creating a pool of potential project directors. The list is yet to be prepared. This is a bureaucratic failure,” said Muhith.
He said there were various factors for poor performance in the implementation this year. “I don't want to talk about them,” he said, adding that the performance of the bureaucracy has neither been very pleasant this year.
AB Mirza Azizul Islam, former adviser to a caretaker government, raised the implementation issue.
In 2015-16, the total planned outlay was Tk 295,100 crore and the actual implementation rate 80 percent.
“The size of the budget is not big. But it is ambitious from the perspective of implementation capacity,” said Islam.
Muhith said the implementation rate in the current fiscal year has not been very good and this year's target has become unrealistic. According to the minister, Tk 374,000 crore to Tk 384,000 crore of the Tk 400,266 crore budget would be implemented in the current fiscal year.
He said he would not offer the scope of whitening black money in the budget as it did not yield good results in the past.
On demographic dividend, Muhith said the country has not been able to reap the benefit because of a failure to create a trained workforce.
Islam called for measures to accelerate the pace of poverty reduction. “The annual rate of poverty reduction is declining. It is alarming,” he said.
Mashiur Rahman, economic affairs adviser to the prime minister, said the number of aged people would start rising from 2050.
Qazi Kholiquzzaman Ahmad, chairman of state-run Palli Karma-Sahayak Foundation, recommended raising allocation for agriculture and the agro-based sectors and the rural economy. BST Chairman AK Abdul Momen, in a paper, said people were in the dark about the government measures aimed at improving the situation in the banking sector.
“The scams in the banking sector are well-known. Thousands of crores of taka have been embezzled through the scams. The banking system is becoming weak,” he said.
Momen demanded measures in order to curb illicit capital flight and steps to stop wastage of public money through delays in implementation of development programmes.
BANKING COMMISSION IN THE OFFING
The government is shortly going to set up a banking commission to look into the financial sector, said Muhith.
“It is not going to be in the budget. It should be set up any time to look into the sector as a whole,” he said.
The minister said the commission has probably become a necessity because the last one was formed in 2004 and the banking sector has grown enormously since then.
He said there were many types of problems in the banking sector.
“Even if you control borrowings by directors, it does not help…because one director is a friend of another director of another bank and so on and a mutual back-patting happens,” he said.
“Banking scams are a very serious matter. And all that I have indicated so far is we are setting up a banking commission very shortly.”
Muhith said the growth of the sector has been very fast and the government has been very generous. He said to have been expecting mergers in the banking sector but it has not taken place. So, the government may need to rewrite the bankruptcy law, he said.
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