EDITORIAL : THE DAILY STAR, BANGLADESH

          

 

Unutilised aid money

Capacity building imperative

Slow pace of project implementation and return of the unutilised fund to its source is a very familiar feature of the Annual Development Programme (ADP) every year. The scenario is not different even in the case of foreign aid. And as a result, billions of dollar worth of scarce as well as precious foreign aid has created a pipeline bulge. This is not just a sad commentary on the project implementation agency's capacity to absorb foreign aid, it does also give a rather negative image of the government.

A report in this paper has brought to the fore afresh how we have failed to put a huge sum of aid money amounting 12 billion US dollars to good use. Though the economy receives some $2 to $3 billion annually in foreign aid, this fiscal it has swelled to $6.5 billion. The Economic Relations Division (ERD) has attributed the increased aid fund to the donors' commitments for the Padma Multipurpose Bridge.

But there are still strong grounds for concern about meeting the project implementation target there. Even the finance ministry has cast doubts seeing that of the total aid commitment, only $1.29b has been disbursed over the first nine months of the current FY. It is worthwhile to note that this is less than last year's disbursement figure. The delay has been due to the fresh conditions imposed by the World Bank relating to pre-qualification of bidders for Padma Bridge project.

The donors' conditionalities apart , it cannot be gainsaid that deeply ingrained bureaucratic sloth, lack of decision-making authority of the of projects-in-charge, tardiness rooted in too many tables that a file has to shuttle between, alleged corruption and a plethora of lapses and foibles dog the entire project administration regime.

The hurdles mentioned bear down heavily on the capacity of the implementation agencies. Keeping the absorption capacity of the ministries in view, we should be more cautious and selective about accepting foreign aid. At the same time, the government must exercise its political will to rid the administration of sloth and waffling.

Post-Aila conditions

Meet environmental threat

The good news, up to a point, is that the south-western districts of the country have been recovering gradually from the effects of the Aila devastation of two years ago. The bad news is that despite such recovery, a clear environmental threat now hovers over the region, especially Satkhira, Khulna and Bagerhat. As an exhaustive report in yesterday's issue of this newspaper notes, decades of shrimp cultivation have left the land in parlous conditions. It is now quite impossible for any agricultural crops to be grown on it. Aila destroyed all the shrimp enclosures in the region, of course. But now that a large segment of farmers previously engaged in shrimp cultivation are planning to return to their original occupation as growers of rice, the salinity of the ground, caused by intensive shrimp farming, has come in the way.

How badly the environment can be affected by thoughtless planning can be seen in the south-west of Bangladesh today. Shrimp cultivation has left 1,000,000 hectares of arable land badly affected by salinity. In all, 77 per cent of agricultural land in the region was given over to shrimp production. The consequences are now out there. Where farmers could, in pre-shrimp cultivation days, grow between 12 and 15 maunds of rice on a bigha of land, they can now expect no more than two maunds. The misery is compounded by the spectacle of trees and plants withering away owing to salinity. Deep tubewells pump out saline water, which poses an additional threat to health.

Damage control measures are called for. Policies which encourage pecuniary gains without taking note of environmental consequences clearly must be rethought. The damage caused to agricultural land in the south-western districts should be an eye-opener, both for the farming community and 'experts' who have encouraged the unbridled production of shrimp. We cannot afford to lose good land to myopic policies.