Ministries should spend dev funds carefully: Mannan

All ministries and divisions should spend development project funds carefully as people are very much aware of expenditures, Planning Minister MA Mannan said on Tuesday.

“We should be careful about not wasting funds,” he told a workshop organised by the Implementation Monitoring and Evaluation Division (IMED) at the National Economic Council conference room in the capital’s Sher-e-Bangla Nagar. The minister also said people are very interested in knowing about the spending of public funds.

“They know how much the government has to pay donors in interest. We need to avoid unnecessary expenses,” he said.

“The countrymen are also interested in the IMED’s activities as they want to know how a project is evaluated. The Statistics and Informatics Division conducts various surveys, including population census. People want to know about these surveys. The organisations carrying out the surveys should work very carefully and properly while monitoring project sites,” he added.

State Minister for Planning Dr Shamsul Alam said independent feedback should be given during project site visits by the IMED so that objective results would come.

“The government is monitoring project work. It wants to know the extent to which development work is benefitting the people or not,” he also said.

“The key component of research is data. We cannot play with data. We should disclose the objectivity of data,” he added.

The state minister further said Bangladesh was moving forward with economic growth.

Among others, Planning Secretary Pradip Ranjan Chakraborty, IMED Secretary Abu Hena Morshed, and senior officials were present at the workshop.