HCM City sees sharp drop in disbursement of public investment in eight months

HCM City (VNA) – Ho Chi Minh City disbursed 13.26 trillion VND (583.55 million USD) of public investment capital in the first eight months of this year, fulfilling only 37.1 percent of its target for the year and representing a drop of 27.4 percent over the same period last year, reported the city's Statistics Office.

In August, the city disbursed only 567 billion VND, equivalent to 42.4 percent of the figure in July, 23 percent of the sum in June and only 13 percent of the amount in last August. The reason behind the fall was the slow down of operations of the majority of projects due to impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic in the city.

HCM City has applied social distancing measures under the Prime Minister’s Directive 16 for many weeks, while the surge in prices and the shortage of construction materials have also caused difficulties for the implementation of projects.

Local authorities reported that major projects, including Thu Thiem 2 bridge and Nguyen Van Linh - Nguyen Huu Tho tunnel, have been halted or seen slow progress due to impacts of the pandemic.

Meanwhile, only construction of Ben Thanh station of Metro Line No. 1 (Ben Thanh - Suoi Tien) project is underway. The project has seen 88 percent of its workload completed. It is likely to fail to reach the target of becoming operational at the end of this year, and is re-scheduled to be put into use in mid-2022.

In 2021, HCM City has allocated over 35.47 trillion of public investment capital to projects, of which more than 3.82 trillion VND comes from the central budget and the rest from the city’ budget./.