Most important task to meet challenges: Muhith

Staff Reporter :Finance Minister AMA Muhith on Wednesday said the government has identified the challenges to the country’s progress.”Now the most important task is to put in place pragmatic programmes to meet these challenges,” he told the house while delivering the budget speech.He said especially, increased female participation in economic activities, skill development, enhanced implementation capacity and quality of investment expenditure and innovation and wider use of technology in production are essential in this respect. “Besides, diversification of export products and markets, expansion of overseas labour markets and planned urbanisation are also essential in this respect,” AMA Muhith said.He said at the same time, channeling resources to important sectors call for increased revenue mobilisation as well as effective utilization of foreign aid.Finance Minister said capacity development in public administration, e-governance modernization of land management, establishment of rule of law including people-centric local government system together will take us a long way towards building a just society.”The existing local government system now seems to be the main impediment to our progress. In terms of size and population, any district of this country is bigger than some countries in the world,” he said. He said in such densely populated country, it would be difficult to infuse dynamism in development initiatives to achieve ten per cent GDP growth unless an enabling environment is created by developing power.