At a meeting with the visiting mission at his Secretariat office, he also bogged down the pressure for closing down loss-making bank branches in rural areas as part of the ongoing banking reforms for being contradictory to the government's policy for the agriculture sector.

"What can we do with the prices of imported items when those went up in the international market," he quizzed while talking to newsmen following the meeting.

The mission from the Interna-tional Monetary Fund (IMF), led by Chanpen Puckahtikom, expressed concern over the rising prices of rod, cement and soybean.

Saifur deplored that the mission wanted to reduce the price of those items on one hand and to increase prices of petroleum products on the other.

He apprised the IMF representatives of the government's decision to deal "cautiously" with prices of the sensitive petroleum products.

On closing down the bank branches, he argued it was not possible to do so quickly as the government attached top priority to boosting the country's agriculture and as the private banks naturally were not interested to branch out to rural areas.

The meeting also discussed overall economic situation of the country, expressing satisfaction over the reduced fiscal deficits, accelerated revenue activities and development expenditure being in proper direction.

At the meeting, the government sought enhanced support from the IMF for accelerating its development activities.

The six-member mission arrived here on February 24 to review the progress of the ongoing financial sector reforms under the IMF's Poverty Reduction Growth Facility (PRGF) programme.

The funding agency committed to providing assistance worth US$490 million in seven instalments under the PRGF and released the first and the second tranches of US$70 million each in June and December last year.

Prior to disbursement of each instalment, the IMF evaluates progress of the reforms, usually on a quarterly basis. The fund is now evaluating the reform progress for the third trance of loan scheduled for June this year.

The mission is scheduled to leave Bangladesh on March 4.