The cycle of snail’s pace and sloppy work must end, if any government is to improve its performance

Now the performance of the government in spending the national budget has arrived for the first quarter of the current fiscal year.

It stands at only 3.42 per cent of the total allocated budget of Rs. 311.95 billion for development works.

It had been said by some government leaders and bureaucrats that from this time around the problem of low spending would not arise, at least seriously, all the more so because the budget presentation had been made one-and-a-half months before the commencement of the fiscal year.

But hardly any improvement has taken place over the past years. Overall, only 12.37 per cent or Rs. 129.72 billion of the total national budget of Rs. 1,048.9 billion was spent during the three months of mid-July to mid-October of this fiscal (2016-17).

The figures show a much greater spending ratio of recurrent expenditure to capital expenditure. The reason is obvious because most of the recurrent expenditure has to be met on time.

The problem of low budget spending relates to capital expenditure. This problem has continued for years, and decades, without any significant improvement.

Successive governments have always been handicapped by an acute shortage of resources to make adequate budget for so many competing needs of the country, having to ration the financial resources at its disposal.

Under such circumstances, a large unspent development budget should be taken as something of a national crime. When the size of the national budget was many times less than the present budget, the government at that time had been unable to spend the development budget fully or almost fully.

Decades down the line, the problem remains the same, despite the fact that inflation has also risen many times over the years and that government had a world of time to learn lessons from the past mistakes and shortcomings.

But one of the major things our political leaders and bureaucrats have sorely lacked seems to be their failure to learn from mistakes and improve in the future.

They have stock excuses every time. With this rate of budget spending, how can the government attain its targeted 6.5 per cent annual economic growth rate? Nor has the work on the post-earthquake reconstruction moved ahead at an encouraging rate?

It is known that the capital spending will increase in the coming months, as always in the past, and the rate of capital spending will accelerate further towards the closing weeks of the fiscal year just to prevent as much of the unspent budget as possible from being frozen for not having been spent.

That means a messy and haphazard way in which they try to spend the remaining budget mainly to finish the budget, rather than to ensure quality work and optimum utilization of the budget.

This cycle of snail’s pace and sloppy work must end, if any government is to improve its performance. Last year too, despite all the last-minute frantic efforts, over 91 billion rupees still remained unspent.

Government cannot be excused year in, year out by offering such reasons for delays as procedural shortcomings and lack of making procurement process more efficient, etc.

Who has stopped successive governments, political leaders and bureaucrats from removing such obstacles?

Household waste

Segregating solid waste products from households is a major problem for its management.

All the households, even in the urban areas, tend to mix up all types of waste products into one bin making it very difficult to divide them at the time of their disposal.

Even the municipalities do not have modern technology to segregate them and use the waste products for economic benefits.

This trend has to be changed if all the municipalities were to be made smart cities to live in.

Keeping this in mind, the Ministry of Federal Affairs and Local Development has given strict instructions to all municipalities to follow the rule of segregating the bio-degradable and non-degradable waste products from the source of origin.

If anyone is found mixing up both the wastes they will be fined from Rs. 5000 to Rs. 25,000. If this provision is strictly implemented the municipalities will face no major hurdle in disposing of the waste products.

The municipalities need to distribute separate bins to each household so that they can segregate the bio-degradable and non-degradable wastes easily.

For this to happen, the concerned should raise awareness encouraging people to maximize the use of bio-degradable wastes at their home.