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Close-fisted budget on the cards

INAM AHMED
The government is taking a cautious approach -- almost clench-fisted and revolutionary in a way -- to formulate the budget for the next fiscal.
The reason behind the guarded going is the reality that external resources have shrunk ominously. It will wilt more with the beginning of the reconstruction of Iraq -- a clear indication for Bangladesh whose typical tendency of pinning its development goals on foreign aid would no more work.
This fiscal's foreign assistance flow has already dropped by Tk 1,200 crore and it is expected to fall further by Tk 1,700 crore next fiscal.
This means trimming the fat off
projects -- shaking away the unnecessary components, rationalising similar projects under same umbrella and more importantly, revisiting the annual development programme (ADP).
The government has been identifying the projects that have duplicity or are of same nature but is being run by different organisations with different sets of staff. They will be brought under one body, or at least the dominant thinking is in that line, according to officials concerned.
Two cases in point may be the Bangladesh Livestock Research Institute; the goat project and the microcredit programmes carried out by the Bangladesh Rural Development Board (BRDB) and by the liberation war affairs ministry. The BLRI can carry out the goat programme and the BRDB the microcredit, saving manpower, overhead costs and the obviousness of having an overhung of development staff. This will certainly reduce the pressure for incorporating completed development project SEE PAGE 11 COL 3 FROM PAGE 1
staff in revenue expenditure.
Similarly, many departments and projects have grown with individual engineering sections. As a result, some key organisations like the Roads and Highways and the Public Works Department are under-utilised. These organisations have huge manpower and big budgets, and the expenditure obligations can be cut down by lumping their tasks into one or a few institutions.
In the rationalisation process, another thinking doing the round is to forego many of the tasks that are not rewarding revenue-wise like realising tolls from bridges. These may be given to private hands.
For new projects, the government will walk clear of earlier practices -recruiting staff of the whole organogram when the scheme conceived. Rather, only the essential staff will be recruited for any new project and more people will be added on to it as the project progresses.
Another crucial decision -- almost already taken -- is to steer projects with full government funds out of the ADP way. Only those with foreign assistance will make into the ADP and the rest will be placed in revenue budget. This will make a much slimmer ADP next year an oft-reiterated wish of the donors.
The other visible benefit would be to avoid costs through taking up new project staff and later facing pressure of absorbing the redundant people.
When it comes to decide where the money will come for the next budget, the government has no other option but to depend crucially on internal resource mobilisation.
It is being planned to increase various non-NBR tax rates which essentially includes various types of registration fees from car to land to apartment and other types of duties.