Ministries slow in getting plans okayed by NPC

MANY ministries are yet to get their development programmes for this fiscal year okayed by the National Planning Commission (NPC) despite the Finance Ministry’s request to get it done by July-end. According to the Finance Ministry, the ministries have submitted about 60 percent of their priority one projects to the NPC as of Friday. Only about 20 percent of the projects had been sent for the NPC’s examination at the end of the month. The ministries had been told to hand in their priority one projects within the third week of July, and NPC had been asked to approve them by July 31. Quick approval of the programmes by the NPC would allow the ministries to ask the implementing agencies to spend on them as early as possible. Besides delayed presentation of the budget, tardiness in getting the plans okayed by the NPC have led to development efforts falling behind schedule in recent years. Meanwhile, Ram Sharan Pudashaini, chief of the monitoring and evaluation department at the Finance Ministry, said that the ministries had been scrambling to send their programmes to the NPC in the past two days. He added that the Education, Physical Infrastructure and Agriculture ministries had been tardy in getting their programmes passed by the NPC. “It is probably due to the large number of programmes they have to deal with.” The government has planned to implement … priority one projects during this fiscal year. Secretary at the Ministry of Physical Infrastructure Tulasi Prasad Sitaula admitted that they could not get all their programmes approved on time as they received their copy of the Annual Development Programmes Part I only on July 24. “We have to design our programmes based on that book,” he said. It contains the programmes to be carried out from the central level. Sitaula said that another reason for the delay was that the plans needed to be finalized by the local offices. He said that all the programmes would be approved this week. The ministry plans to implement 50 programmes and 250 individual projects this fiscal. Sitaula said that about 30 programmes had been sent to the NPC for its examination as of Friday. Meanwhile, the NPC said that the ministries had started sending their programmes only in the last few days. “We have been urging the ministries to hurry up,” said Pushpa Lal Shakya, joint secretary at the NPC. “We have also been approving the programmes in three days even though we have been given one week to do so.” He added that, based on past experience, it would take until mid-August to approve all the programmes.