94.32pc of ADP spent

The government has been able to spend 94.32 percent of its development budget in 2018-19, going for a huge outlay in the last month of the just-concluded fiscal year, official data showed.

The spending of Tk 166,593 crore in the last fiscal year was the highest in the last six years, according to data from the Implementation Monitoring and Evaluation Division of the planning ministry.

In June alone, the government spent Tk 46,551 crore, which accounted for more than one-fourth of the Tk 176,620 crore development budget earmarked for the full fiscal year.

From its own coffers, the government used Tk 111,033 crore last fiscal year, which is 95.72 percent of the allocation. Some 92.70 percent of foreign aid allocation, or Tk 47,279 crore, was used for development purposes.

The government’s expenditure from its own sources rose in the last fiscal year, compared to what it was in 2017-18. The spending from the foreign component fell, year-on-year. 

Until June, the government had been way behind its development spending target.

Between July and May, ministries and divisions managed to spend Tk 120,043 crore, up from Tk 98,978 crore in the same period a year ago,

This left the government with a massive task of spending five times more, Tk 56,577 crore, in June than its monthly average of Tk 10,913 crore to reach the target.

The ADP implementation scenario, however, has changed from what it was at the beginning of the last fiscal year. It picked up in November amid the fervour surrounding the national polls in December.

A planning ministry official said the finance and planning ministries took some measures in the beginning of 2018-19 to boost the spending and the measures started to bear fruit from November.

Since November, the expenditure has averaged more than Tk 12,000 crore per month in contrast to Tk 6,216 crore posted every month in the preceding four months.

In June last year, the finance division empowered project directors, giving them authority to release funds in the first two quarters of a fiscal year by themselves instead of waiting for approval from ministries or divisions, an exercise that takes up two to three months.

Finance Minister AHM Mustafa Kamal has set aside Tk 211,683 crore for development spending in the new fiscal year, up 27 percent from the actual expenditure in 2018-19.