When a recent World Bank report and the outcome of a cabinet meeting have waxed critical of the bureaucratic handling of development projects, it must come as some relief to top government officials that the World Bank has freed up two projects it had earlier placed in the 'risk category.' While the relief seems prppitious, and even well-earned for the fact that under the very watchful eyes of World Bank the best in them came spurting through their redoubled efforts at regaining those two projects, there are lessons to be learnt as well from the episode.

The two projects getting a clean bill of health are: the Integrated Nutrition Project (INP) and the Third Inland Water Transport Project, the first one having to do with national, community and intersectoral level nutrition and the second with institutionally assisting a borrower's strategy for development in the IWT sector. These projects come in a better light in the eye of the World Bank now for having satisfied its rather stringent criteria of "project development objectives and rate of implementation progress."

The difference in the situation has been made in a matter nine months with the implementing agencies pulling up their socks and putting their shoulders to the wheel. The procurement, administrative and consultancy constraints faced in the two projects could be common to some other WB-aided projects.

In fact, the projects still considered to be in the woods relate to jute sector credit adjustment, power distribution, urban development, minor irrigation development, integrated nutrition and inland water transport parametres of vital importance to national life.

All these projects need to be bailed out quickly | by staving off logistic, management and coordina-I tion problems that beset them.

We wonder if there could be regular exchanges between the World Bank's antenna-keepers and the project monitoring division of the government of Bangladesh at an operational level rather than at the post-facto academic level sometimes as it happens to be.