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          The government is reviewing fresh proposals for expenditures outside the Annual Development Programme (ADP) by various state agencies in the backdrop of current budgetary resource constraints, official sources said.
"The government has adopted a tight policy on allocating fresh funds for non-ADP development activities due to its resource constraints," said a finance ministry official.
Officials at the expenditure control wing of the finance ministry stated that non-ADP expenditures "are being cautiously dealt with", taking the government's prevailing resource constraints into account.
The wing has already advised the concerned government agencies to drop their development expenditure plans for the projects other than the on-going ones during the current financial year, said the official.
The advice came following the receipt of a growing number of funding proposals for unapproved projects and programmes by the finance ministry from various government agencies, sources said.
They further said at this time every year, many government agencies seek funds for fresh development activities outside the ADP and the authorities do also often try to meet their demands.
"Now the government finds itself in a difficult situation to meet such demands mainly due to non-availability of fund," said an official.
Taking the resource availability situation into consideration, the wing has already rejected a good number of new expenditure proposals made by various government agencies, the official said, without elaborating.
The government has taken a restrictive expenditure policy in view of light resource situation mainly because of a significant shortfall of its tax-revenue collection, he noted.
Official figures showed that the collection of government's tax revenue fell considerably short of the target during the past few months.
The overall revenue earnings during the July-January period of the fiscal 2005-06 were nearly 17 per cent below the target.
The National Board of Revenue (NBR) was able to collect revenue worth around Tk 173 billion during this period of the current fiscal against the target of Tk 207.97 billion for the same period.
The government has set its total revenue collection target at Tk 356.52 billion for the entire fiscal year 2005-06.
The revenue shortfall has also put the government in a difficult situation to meet its overall expenditure target, according to sources.