Planning and education adviser Wahiduddin Mahmud on Monday said that projects awaiting approval of the Executive Committee of the National Economic Council would be scrutinised and unnecessary and politically motivated projects would be scrapped.
There was massive indiscipline in valuation and design of many projects, he聽 said while talking to reporters at his planning ministry office.
Also many of the projects were politically motivated, he said while highlighting the disrepute of the immediate past Awami League regime that many infrastructure projects it undertook cost the highest in the world only to favour its chosen contractors.
Decision was taken to identify and scrap the unimportant projects quickly, he said.
Hinting at downsizing the current annual development programme, the adviser said that management of the development projects was important for the country鈥檚 macro-economy that had been under stress for almost past two years.
Around 1,321 projects have been implemented in the annual development programme for FY25 at an estimated Tk 2.65 lakh crore of which Tk 1.65 lakh has been projected to be drawn from the local sources and rest Tk 1 lakh to be borrowed from the foreign sources.聽聽
Growth in the Gross Domestic Product was not all about the economy, he said, adding, employment was more important.聽聽聽聽聽聽聽聽聽聽聽
Answering a question on costly projects he said that the Implementation, Monitoring and Evaluation Division would examine reasons behind repeated revision of high-cost projects.
The documentation will help in the future plans, he noted.
Wahiduddin Mahmud said that directives had been given to find out intentional and unintentional errors in preparing national data over the past several years while responding to another question on alleged distortions of data by that Bangladesh Bureau Statistics.
He said that he agreed to become the planning adviser to the interim government since there were scopes to take projects for human development.
He reiterated that infrastructure without human resources was merely skeleton.
Criticising the immediate past political government for constructing infrastructure under different initiatives without arranging manpower to run it, he said that the interim government would make such infrastructure operational.聽
