Expressing doubt over the attainment of the Tk 5.3 trillion budget proposed for 2019-20 fiscal, economist Akbar Ali Khan says that unrealistic figures have been placed in the budget over a couple of years.
“Revenue and expenditure set in the FY20 budget won’t be achieved. And the problem is that how much real these figures are?” Khan told a discussion in Dhaka on Friday (Jun 14), a day after the budget was presented in parliament.
The former bureaucrat said, “Size of the budget gets bigger every year with a constant increase in lack of capacity whereas the capacity of budget implementation becomes gradually weak.”
The scenario would repeat in the next fiscal, warned the economist.
According to Khan, regional discrimination appears acutely in allocating the budget despite half of many districts’ total population live under properly line.
“No initiative has been taken in the budget to remove the discrimination,” he said.
Another discussant Dr Salehuddin Ahmed said that the main challenge of this year’s budget is to ensure growth based on equality.
“Lower and middle-income people will face more pressure for this budget,’ said Ahmed, a former governor of Bangladesh Bank.