PM's directives

The PM's directives to the top officials have two important components. She has asked them to accelerate the pace of releasing funds and, in case of non-implementation of projects, to surrender the unutilised money.

The failure to implement the projects under the ADP in time has obvious drawbacks that the planners must take into consideration. When projects are implemented in hot haste at the fag end of a fiscal year, the normal procedures are ignored. It can spawn corruption and anomalies like violation of tender rules, poor procurement or delivery, leading to cost overrun that a poor country can ill afford. The quality of work also suffers when the project managers' main concern is to beat the clock. Finally, projects may remain incomplete despite the last-minute attempt to gear everything up, which is a failure that is seen as proof of our inefficiency by the development partners. It also adversely affects overall development planning.

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The PM's directives have an extra bit of relevance in the present context because of the marked under-implementation of the ADP in the current fiscal.

However, the question is how things can be handled with the desired efficiency, and improved substantively, when we are already into the last month of the fiscal 2003-04.

The instructions of the PM have exposed the fact that the performance of the bureaucracy has been lacklustre, to say the least. But there is perhaps no way to allow things to remain where they are, if only because the donors and development partners are always stressing the need for increasing the efficiency of our project implementation mechanism. The government must not overlook that the burning issues of corruption and wastage of national resources have a lot to do with delayed and shoddy project implementation.