There has been a slight in­crease in the Pub­lic Sec­tor In­vest­ment Pro­gramme (PSIP) al­lo­ca­tion for the 2020/2021 fis­cal year when com­pared to re­vised 2019/20 al­lo­ca­tion ac­cord­ing to the Min­istry of Plan­ning and De­vel­op­ment.

It ex­plained the orig­i­nal al­lo­ca­tion of $5.387 bil­lion for 2019/20, was re­vised down­wards from its orig­i­nal al­lo­ca­tion and some of the funds were re­al­lo­cat­ed to oth­er ar­eas to help the na­tion deal with COVID-19.

In a state­ment, the min­istry not­ed that at the end of the 2019/2020 fis­cal pe­ri­od the fi­nal al­lo­ca­tion to the PSIP was $4,077,516,555. In the 2019 bud­get pre­sen­ta­tion, the Fi­nance Min­is­ter an­nounced the $5.387 bil­lion al­lo­ca­tion, which was a few months be­fore the world and T&T felt the brunt of the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic.

“Fi­nal fig­ures in­di­cate that over the past five years the PSIP al­lo­ca­tions have av­er­aged ap­prox­i­mate­ly $4 bil­lion,” the min­istry added.

The min­istry ar­gued that this year’s al­lo­ca­tion will as­sist with the im­ple­men­ta­tion of projects to sup­port pro­grammes with­in the sec­tors of ed­u­ca­tion, hous­ing and shel­ter, health/HIV-Aids, com­mu­ni­ty de­vel­op­ment, wa­ter se­cu­ri­ty, roads and bridges, drainage, crime al­le­vi­a­tion and work­force de­vel­op­ment among oth­ers.