After several ministries and government entities have failed to produce desired results, Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal has publicly expressed his “unease” over the state of public service delivery.

At a mid-term review meeting of the government’s policies and programmes and the annual budget at Singha Durbar on Thursday, Prime Minister Dahal said that the performance indicators of several ministries were bleak as they failed to meet the set targets and milestones.

This failure has increased a kind of “restlessness in me”, the prime minister said at the function.

“When I was leading the government for the third time, we had publicly committed to working for good governance, social justice and prosperity.

“We started off with great enthusiasm. When we were about to complete one year in office, we were doing an average job. But now, as we make this mid-term assessment, my restlessness has grown,” said Dahal.

An assessment of the government’s one year in office in December last year had found that service delivery and budget expenditure were in decline, prompting Dahal to instruct the ministers and top bureaucrats to speed up the work overall.

Several ministries and entities had been unable to improve service delivery, increase budget expenditure, and meet other targets and milestones set by themselves.

During the assessment meeting in December, Dahal had asked all the ministries to submit their progress reports to the prime minister’s office every 15 days. But there was no follow-up to this.

The political and bureaucratic leaders were not pragmatic while selecting the projects and setting the targets, said the prime minister, and the programmes could not address the ground reality.

Presenting the data, Dahal said, only 36 percent of the 1,767 milestones were met by the end of January, 51 percent programmes are in progress and 14 percent projects have not even started.

Even after nine months of the current fiscal year, 245 milestones could not be measured in the absence of programme implementation, which raises questions about the government mechanism’s capacity, said Dahal.

The prime minister also painted a bleak picture of revenue collection. By the end of January, only 74 percent of the revenue target was met. Capital expenditure remains poor with only 24 percent progress in the last nine months.

“Without capital formation, development activities cannot be accelerated, which we all know. And with such poor spending, the economy cannot function smoothly,” said the prime minister. “We have no convincing answers to why we could not achieve the targets set by ourselves.”