Bangladesh’s interim government has formed a committee to assess total volume of khas land under different public entities that lies so that those can be utilized for development project instead of acquiring arable land.
The decision was taken at a meeting of the Executive Committee of the National Economic Council (ECNEC) held Wednesday with Chief Adviser Prof Muhammad Yunus in the chair, Planning Adviser Dr Wahiduddin Mahmud told reporters at a briefing later.
He said the committee headed by Land Adviser Ali Imam Mozumder has been tasked to prepare its report within the next two months after taking necessary inputs from the field-level.
It will ascertain the volume of unutilized khas land that lies with the various ministries and divisions across the country after taking information from the concerned district administration.
“Before taking any development projects in the future, the issue of utilizing the khas land which remained unutilized for long would be given preference instead of using farm and arable land,” Wahiduddin said.
In the face of slowing pace of the Annual Development Programme (ADP) implementation, the government will convene an inter-ministerial meeting next week to investigate the reasons behind the lacklusture execution.
Dr. Wahiduddin revealed that ADP implementation in July and August stood at just 2.39 percent, slightly below the 2.57 percent recorded in the same period last fiscal year.
“Typically, we see progress between 3 and 4 percent during this period. We had anticipated a quicker start this year, but that hasn’t happened,” said Dr. Mahmud. “This meeting will help us identify the bottlenecks and chart a corrective course.”
Several issues are believed to be hindering progress, including frequent project revisions, untimely transfers of project directors, and contractors abandoning works midstream. A more recent concern, Dr. Mahmud noted, is the declining interest among civil servants to serve as project directors—despite the role offering additional benefits.
He also cited troubling irregularities in some projects, including unauthorized land acquisitions and expenditures exceeding approved allocations. In one case, a project was shut down after spending several crore taka on land acquisition without official clearance, leaving the government responsible for Tk 20 crore in liabilities.
Despite the setbacks, the Planning Adviser pointed to encouraging signs. Ministries overseeing large infrastructure sectors—such as water resources, railways, public works, power, and energy—are reportedly taking extra time to adopt newly introduced procurement formats and compliance procedures aimed at improving project discipline and reducing irregularities.
The planning adviser said the upcoming Public Procurement Rules, 2025 would be a “silent milestone” in the government’s procurement process as no vested quarter would be able to manipulate anymore the tendering process with the amendments to the rules.
Additionally, the government plans to finalize the revised national budget by mid-February, ahead of the usual timeline, in a bid to improve fiscal planning and execution.
Besides, he said that the government would not take foreign loans unwisely without considering the consequences and benefits. “We’ve taken foreign loans in limited scale during our tenure which was deemed very necessary. We’re not interested in taking only soft term loans…we don’t want to raise unwisely our debt burden,”
He said that projects would be framed by the implementing agencies in line with the priority and thus those would be sent to the Economic Relations Division (ERD) for seeking foreign funding if deemed necessary.
After analyzing the proposals of funding from the development partners, the government would take decisions, he added.
The Planning Adviser also noted that it needs to be unearthed why it often takes much cost while implementing projects with foreign funding like why the per kilometer road construction or bridge construction or metro construction costs were high in the past compared to other countries.
Dr Mahmud also underscored the need for taking early preparations by the executing agencies in land acquisition before rolling out the implementation work of the development projects.
He said that due to the relentless government efforts and strict monitoring, irregularities in the development schemes have gone down significantly.
Referring to the two energy sector projects which were approved on Wednesday, the Planning Adviser said that the government has been trying its best to explore more wells through enhancing the capacity of BAPEX to decrease LNG imports.