FY22 budget to focus on the poor, livelihoods: Finance minister 

The cabinet committee on public procurement approves eight procurement proposals of Tk2,205 crore, including LNG imports

Finance Minister AHM Mustafa Kamal on Wednesday said the budget for the fiscal year 2021-22 would be dedicated to the poor and people's livelihoods would be given the utmost importance.

"The aim of the government is to alleviate poverty by lifting people out of it,"he said while talking to reporters after a virtual meeting of the cabinet committee on public procurement.

He said, "We are taking measures to create pathways to get out of poverty which will upgrade the status of some people living in extreme poverty."

According to a report of two private research institutes, Power and Participation Research Centre and Brac Institute of Governance and Development, the Covid-19 pandemic caused some 2.5 crore people to fall below the poverty line and the debt burden doubled for people living in both urban and rural areas.

When asked about the report findings, the minister said, "We will only accept the data after it is monitored and assessed by Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS)."

He said the cabinet committee on public procurement had approved eight procurement proposals of Tk2,205 crore, including LNG imports. Of those, Tk1,883 crore would come from the government's own funds while Tk322 crore would be borrowed from the Asian Development Bank.

The proposal to buy 33.6 lakh MMBTU LNG from Singapore's Vitol Asia Pte Ltd was approved. The price of per unit MMBTU LNG is $8.012 and the purchase will cost Petrobangla Tk267.57 crore. 

The committee approved the proposal to purchase medicine directly from state-owned Essential Drugs Company at a cost of Tk140 crore to supply 27 types of medicine to 13,881 community clinics across the country.

In addition, the Tk696.76 crore purchase proposal involving the construction of 124km sewer pipelines, three sewerage pumping stations, and 13,800 service connections under the Khulna sewerage system development project was approved. China GEO-Engineering Corporation got the job.