December 20-2013
. . . holding the line
The Rohani Administration says it has not started even a single development project since taking office and will not do so until it has reduced the huge backlog of partly completed projects.
It is routine for new presidents to decry the standard Iranian practice of starting new projects with abandon, getting the required funds by taking them from previous projects, thus stretching out the construction time for projects.
When President Khatami took office in 1997, he publicly decried that practice under the Rafsanjani Administration and swore he would start no new projects until the current ones were completed. That pledge fell by the wayside before long. And President Ahmadi-nejad complained about the backlog of partly finished projects when he took office and promised to fix that.
On Sunday, Mohammad-Baqer Nobakht, the deputy to the president for planning, announced that Rohani had not started any projects in his 4 1/2 months in office and has not approved any to go forward.
Nobakht said there are 2,906 development projects currently underway. He said the Administration would concentrate funding on 184 projects that are more than 80 percent complete and 62 that are 20-to-80 percent complete and aim to finish them before Now Ruz 2015.
He didn’t say what would happen to the 2,660 other projects currently underway. He gave no hint as to whether any might be abandoned—which suggested that some might indeed be abandoned.
Nobakht said the development section of next year’s draft budget, submitted earlier this month to the Majlis, has been cut by a third compared to Ahmadi-nejad’s final budget. He said Rohani’s development budget totals 380 trillion rials ($12.7 billion at the free market exchange rate) or just under 20 percent of the government budget.
