The proposed national budget for 2021-2022 fiscal year lacks a clear outline to protect the lives and livelihoods of people, Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD) observed.
“The budget doesn’t seem to recognise the implementation challenges and so, it has not spelled out ways to overcome those. Nothing has been mentioned about the capacity development, stronger monitoring and evaluation, results-based framework towards better implementation of the budgetary proposals,” said CPD Executive Director Fahmida Khatun.
CPD, a non-governmental economic think tank, came up with the observations on the national budget, which was placed in Parliament on Thursday, at a press conference at a city hotel on Friday.
The CPD executive director said the proposed targets in the new budget are far from reality if the actual scenario at the end of the ongoing fiscal year (FY21) is taken into consideration.
In the budget, it has been mentioned that health, agriculture and employment generation have been given priority while allocating resources for ADP.
However, the actual allocation does not reflect this as these promises have not been supported by adequate resources, said Fahmida Khatun. “Unlike last year, there has been clarity of thoughts about Covid management in the budget documents, but it has no similarity to the measures and allocations to tackle the challenges,” Fahmida Khatun added.
The budget documents refer to management of the Covid-19 situation which was absent during the first Covid budget (FY21), she said.
However, the budget does not have much to offer in terms of concrete measures and innovative policies to combat the Covid-induced challenges, the CPD executive director said.
Stating that the Health Ministry’s performance is the poorest in implementing the ADP, she said there will be no benefit if the allocation for the sector is enhanced without improving the institutional competence of the sector through reforms.
Some employment-generating and infrastructure development projects have not got ADP allocation in FY2, Fahmida Khatun added.
