TEHRAN- National Development Fund of Iran allocated €250 million to implementation of water, and electricity projects with high priority in the country, ILNA reported on Saturday quoting an official with the Energy Ministry as saying.

Mohsen Bakhtiar, the deputy energy minister for planning and economic affairs, said of the mentioned figure some €150 million has been earmarked for expediting implementation of water-supply projects in the rural areas, €50 million for improving quality of drinking water and stable supply of water in the cities where there is water crisis, and €50 million to beat the haze and reduce its effect on the electricity network.

The official further said that the budget bill for the next Iranian calendar year (starts on March 20, 2020) has allocated 450 trillion rials (about $10.7 billion) to Energy Ministry.

On December 8, President Hassan Rouhani submitted the administration’s draft of the national budget bill for the next Iranian calendar year 1399 to the Majlis.

The proposed budget amounted to about 1.988 quadrillion rials (about $473.5 billion at the official rate of 42,000 rials), with a 14-percent rise from the current year’s approved budget.

Like the current year’s budget, the next year’s proposed budget requires the government to pay 20 percent of its oil revenues to the National Development Fund (NDF).

As previously announced by Mohammad Baqer Nobakht, the head of Iran’s Planning and Budget Organization (PBO), the government intends to invest as much as it can in development sector in the next Iranian year, so it has increased the budget for this sector by 53 percent in the budget bill to achieve significant growth.

MA/MA