The government has prepared a draft public private partnership screening manual, which the ministries will use in identifying infrastructure projects to ensure project standard.
It would be placed at the next meeting of the cabinet committee on economic affairs for approval, said official sources.
Asian Development Bank has assisted preparing the draft manual to woo local and foreign investors to large infrastructural projects through reducing bureaucratic hassles.
As per the manual, the PPP projects will be placed in the national infrastructure plan under the Planning Commission or Ministries.
The line ministries will initially finalise a project going through four stages and send to the PPP Office, which will also go through four other stages and assess economic viability.
The ministries will screen a proposed PPP project coming from the Planning Commission. They will take help of the screening manual to identify proper development projects conducting a prior feasibility study.
The ministries will also prepare preliminarily project resource allocation. At the fourth stage, the line ministries will finalise the project and send it to the PPP Office for evaluation and scrutiny.
The whole process is called the line ministries’ project identification and pre-development system.
The PPP Office will take the next course of action to finalise the process.
In the PPP Office, the project can either be accepted or cancelled.
As per the manual, the PPP Office will conduct a prior feasibility assessment of the project which will be treat as a business under public private partnership.
The PPP Office will have an evaluation committee which will evaluate the project to decide if it should be implemented or cancelled.
In his first budget speech in 2009, Finance Minister AMA Muhith announced implementation of big projects under the PPP scheme, but none of them have taken shape yet.
In every budget since 2009, the government has allocated funds for it. In the outgoing year, it has used only Tk5bn. In the upcoming fiscal year’s budget too, Tk30bn has been set aside.
