Slow progress in projects irks JICA

Japan International Cooperation Agency has threatened to impose conditions on future loans as slow progress of the implementation of projects funded by it has irked the agency.
Implementation of nine of the 18 JICA-funded projects was listless until the sixth month of the ongoing financial year, December, officials said.
Of the projects, Maternal, Neonatal and Child Health and Health System Improvement Project and Disaster Risk Management Enhancement Project have zero disbursement although loan agreements were signed in December 2015 and June 2016 respectively.
Chittagong City Outer Ring Road, Foreign Direct Investment Promotion and Small Scale Water Resources Development projects were identified as significantly underperformed by JICA officials at a review meeting on January 24.
City Governance Project, Upazila Governance and Development Project and Dhaka-Chittagong Main Power Grid Strengthening Project were also among the listless projects identified at the meeting.
JICA senior programme manager Suman Das Gupta noted at the meeting that foreign direct investment promotion project was yet to be approved by the government although the loan agreement was signed three years ago.
The official threatened that JICA might consider approval of projects as a prerequisite for loan agreements from the next loan package.
When contacted, the JICA office in Dhaka did not elaborate the threat its officials issued on loans bearing less than 1 per cent interest rate.
Replying to a mail on February 20, JICA informed that it could not disclose any confidential content to press regarding presentation of the portfolio review meeting.
Economic Relations Division officials, however, were less worried with such threat although Bangladesh received $1.54 billion loan from Japan from April 2017 to March 2018 (Japanese financial), up by 223 per cent over the corresponding period of the previous financial year.
Additional secretary Shahidul Islam, who deals with the United States and Japan, told New Age on February 25 that JICA had issued such threat in pervious loan review meetings also.
He said many JICA-funded projects were well on track.
But the division wanted all projects should be right on track by the implementing ministries and agencies with especial focus on documentation and approval process, he said.
He said that the division already asked the 
ministries and divisions to address the obstacles identified by the funding agency.
Besides the delay in projects approval process, the funding agency identified that hindrances in appointment of consultant in time delayed the Maternal, Neonatal and Child Health and Health System Improvement Project by 33 months, said the officials.
The funding agency also noted that delay in submission of audit reports as well as audit related objections hampered loan disbursement process.
The officials said that implementation of not only the JICA-funded projects but other foreign-funded projects were also slow that forced the government to trim down foreign loans by 9.0 per cent or Tk 4,950 crore from the current annual development project. 
In the first six months of 2018-19, the ADP implementation rate was slow as the implementing agencies could only 
spend Tk 49,595 crore or 27.42 per cent of the total allocation of Tk 1,80,869 crore in the July-December period.

News Courtesy: www.newagebd.net