The approval came from the 10th Ecnec meeting of the current fiscal year, held virtually with Ecnec Chairperson and Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in the chair.

The Prime Minister and Planning Minister MA Mannan joined the meeting from Ganobhaban through a videoconference, while other Ecnec members were connected from NEC Bhaban.

“Today, we placed four projects from three ministries. Of them, three are completely fresh projects and one is for revision. The estimated cost of the projects is Tk 796.45 crore (only additional cost of the revised project was counted here),” said MA Mannan at a press briefing.

Of the total cost, Tk 623.65 crore will be borne from the state coffer, while the rest Tk 172.80 crore will come as loan from the World Bank, he said.

About the Mouza and Plot-Based National Digital Land Zone Project, the Planning Minister said the Land Ministry will implement the project at a cost of Tk 337.60 crore by June 2024.

According to the project factsheet, its major objectives are to make mouza and plot-based digital land zoning maps identifying the lands into different categories like agriculture, housing, commercial, tourism and industrial plots considering the quality of lands as well as to design a plan over the usage of land; to prepare mouza and plot-based land data for ensuring proper field-level land management across the country, training over the usage of zone-based lands; to enhance public awareness in this regard; and formation of a separate unit under the Land Ministry to keep the land zoning activities operational.

The project will be implemented at 56,348 mouzas of 4,562 unions in 493 upazilas under 64 districts of the country.

The main operations of the project include collection, scanning, digitisation, creation database of 138,412 mouza map sheets, making the mouza map sheets with geo-referencing, procurement of 4 high resolution scanners, meeting the cost of Tk 30 crore against land use surveys and the cost of 65 crore against satellite images.

Two other new projects are Bhairab River Re-excavation (2nd Phase) Project involving Tk 237.56 crore and Canal Re-excavation to address Water-logging in Begumganj, Chatkhil, Senbag and Sonaimuri upazilas of Noakhali Project with Tk 71.87 crore.

The Ecnec meeting okayed the first revision of Bangladesh Regional Waterway Transport Project-1 (Improvement of Chattogram-Dhaka-Ashuganj and connecting river routes and installation of terminals and others) raising both the cost and time.

The project cost was raised by 149.42 crore as it has increased to Tk 3,349.42 crore in the revision from the original cost of Tk 3,200 crore.

The project deadline was extended to December 2025 from the original deadline of June 2024.

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