The number of proposals seeking revision of projects by the ministries and divisions under the annual development programme almost halved in the first five months of the current FY25.
Total 76 proposals, mostly linked to extension of projects, have been submitted to the Planning Commission in the July鈥揘ovember period of FY25, compared with 143 in the same period of the FY24.
Implementation, Monitoring and Evaluation Division officials attributed the political changeover since August 5 for the falling trend in seeking revision of projects.聽聽
Besides, they called the current interim government鈥檚 scrutiny to identify the politically motivated and redundant projects as the other major reason.
Officials at the division said that despite repeated directives from the policymakers in the immediate past regime for implementing the development projects timely, extension of the projects could not be avoided in many cases.聽
Officials said that the directives yielded little impact as an ample number of politically motivated projects without proper feasibility studies were undertaken and huge corruption was perpetrated.聽聽聽聽聽聽
Such revised projects involving both time and cost overruns was growing in number in the past several years of the Awami League鈥檚 15-years regime, causing an increasing wastage of public funds and reducing economic benefits of these projects.
The number of revised projects in the ADP for FY24 was 429, while 369 in FY23, 326 in FY22 and 285 in FY21.
Besides, revision of projects, especially those implemented with foreign loans, adversely impacted the debt payment, officials said.
For seven such megaprojects, identified as fast track projects, the Awami League regime revised budget to Tk 1,95,116.87 crore from an initial estimate of聽 Tk 1,14,547.56 crore, recording a whopping 70.34 per cent increase.
Those projects are鈥擯adma Multipurpose Bridge Project; Multi Lane Road Tunnel under the river Karnaphuli; Dhaka Mass Rapid Transit Development Project; Padma Bridge Rail Link Project; Dohazari to Cox鈥檚 Bazar Railway Track; Payra Deep Sea Port; Matarbari Ultra Super Critical Coal Fired Power Project.聽
鈥楾he White Paper on the state of the Bangladesh economy鈥� commissioned by the interim government identified time and cost escalation and their implications for the estimates of return on investment as a major concern for the ADP for which annual spending reached around Tk 2 lakh crore in the recent years.聽
The White Paper, prepared by a 12-member committee with economist Debapriya Bhattacharya in the lead, said that megaprojects implemented mostly with foreign loans by the now ousted Awami League regime have left the nation with debt trap worries amid questionable expected returns.
The overseas debt repayment hit more than three times higher to Tk 37,307 crore in FY24 than the amount paid three years ago.
In FY21, around Tk 12,018 was required to clear the overseas debt payment, according to the Economic Relations Division.