The study mentioned that around 250 missions of different donor agencies visit Bangladesh annually either to prescribe new conditions or monitor whether the pre-conditions are being properly complied with.

Though the Paris Declaration of the OECD prevents donor agencies from setting any prior conditions, Bangladesh still has to swallow such measures as it has failed to check corruption and also due to lack of timely, transparent and reliable reporting on budget execution.

Economic Research Group (ERG), headed by Prof Wahiduddin Mahmud, conducted the study sponsored by the Commonwealth Secretariat, London.

The study was based on interviews with a large number of government officials, political and business leaders, officials of donor agencies, NGO personalities and researchers. The draft of the study will be placed before a civil society gathering next week in Dhaka before finalising it to be sent to the next meeting of the Commonwealth finance ministers.

The report said a timely and transparent budget execution is a must to get rid of conditions by donors as per the Paris Declaration. The government will have to open up its budgetary operations for independent experts to monitor. For these to happen, the Official Secrets Act has to be repealed, the study says.

The study says the Planning Commission does not have the expertise to scrutinise projects according to the Poverty Reduction Strategy priorities. "On the top of it, there are well-known adverse political incentives that are liable to distort public spending priorities," it says.

The ERG study quotes a top Bangladesh government official who said there is little incentive within the government to prepare aid-worthy projects because the officials are used to spoon-feeding by the donors.

The study also reveals that donors often do not know what to do with their funds. "The Australian aid agency was recently interested in providing funds in certain development areas but did not know what to do as the ministries allegedly could not help them to prioritise the use of funds," says the ERG study.

About the faulty-design of projects, the study says donor agencies tend to push the aid agenda of their headquarters or apply global templates in designing projects without adequate feedback about local cultural traditions and institutional characteristics.

Citing an example, the study reports that a recent evaluation on rehabilitation of some of the projects of the Bangladesh Water Development Board shows that the original purpose of the projects were vindicated by more than 80 per cent of the people in the respective localities, but only one out of the 35 projects could be successfully rehabilitated. "Among many problems, neglect of the details of local circumstances was found to be the main cause of failure," the ERG study observed. .

The report says an in-depth ex-post impact study of a project by DANIDA found that although the project have had some beneficial effects on the region's economy, most of the goals including sustainability remained unfulfilled. Among the weaknesses specially cited by the study were too much reliance on expatriate advisers and a top-down set-up bypassing the government systems. More than 60 long-term expatriate advisers -- most of them Danish --worked 2-3 years each on the project.

About frequent cancellations of aid to on-going projects and premature termination of projects, the study suggested that public monitoring of mutual accountability would be greatly served if donors and the government could agree to make the reasons of such actions public.