Bangladesh’s budget implementation trap

Every year, Bangladesh presents a national budget that reads like a manifesto of ambitions. This year is no different. The proposed budget of Tk9.38 trillion for FY2026-27 arrives with familiar promises: more for education, more for health, more for social protection, more for farmers.

The numbers are larger. The headlines are encouraging. And yet, seasoned observers will recognise the same uncomfortable question lurking beneath the surface: Can any of it actually be delivered? 

This and other uncomfortable questions were explored by a cross-section of experts at the PPRC Ajker Agenda Webinar on Budget 2026-27 recently. Across sectors, the panel arrived at a shared and sobering assessment: the budget's ambitions are considerable, but the gap between what is promised and what is delivered remains the defining challenge. 

The revenue target alone tells a revealing story. The government has projected revenue collection requiring an increase of roughly 42-43% over what was previously collected. Bangladesh has consistently failed to meet its revenue targets in recent years. The revenue target is no longer derived from a realistic assessment of what can be collected. Instead, a large expenditure figure is decided first, and the revenue number is calculated backwards to make the fiscal arithmetic appear coherent. The target is not a projection. It is a residual.

This matters enormously. When revenue falls short, the government borrows more from banks. When government borrowing increases, less credit remains available for private businesses. When private credit tightens, investment slows. When investment slows, growth weakens. When growth weakens, revenues decline further. This budget does not present a convincing plan for breaking that cycle.

The preconditions for economic recovery, i.e., a stable banking sector, reliable energy supply, improved law and order, and simplified regulation are all mentioned in the budget. But mention is not delivery. The promise of one-stop business licensing within seven days has been repeated for three decades without materialising. Institutional cultures cannot be changed by a budget speech.

The same gap between rhetoric and reality is persistent in the agriculture sector. The budget continues a familiar pattern of positive incremental measures without any meaningful structural shift. Measures such as subsidies on importing raw materials for fertilisers, pesticides, veterinary medicines and the emphasis on canal and river excavation to improve surface water availability are well intentioned. 

However, dredging without sustained maintenance yields little lasting benefit. Rivers reaccumulate silt within a single monsoon season, and the cycle of allocation and deterioration repeats year after year without an effective remedial mechanism in place.

More fundamentally, the budget does not reckon seriously with who actually farms Bangladesh's land. Approximately 1.5 crore marginal and small farmers, each owning less than 2.5 acres, collectively cultivate roughly two-thirds of the country's total cultivable area. The Farmer Card initiative is designed to reach this population. Yet without a functioning database of small farmers, maintained either through local government institutions or agricultural extension departments, no card-based scheme can be effectively targeted or evaluated. This gap is not a minor administrative oversight. 

Bangladesh has not conducted a comprehensive agricultural census since 1986-87, which means that four decades of structural change in land ownership, farm size, and rural livelihoods remain inadequately documented at the policy level. Issuing cards without a reliable understanding of who holds the land and what they actually require is administration in the absence of strategy. 

What this sector urgently requires is not another round of conventional support measures, but a genuinely innovation-based approach that actively integrates marginal farmers into a modernising agricultural economy, rather than leaving them at its periphery.

In education, allocations have risen impressively. But Bangladesh is facing a learning crisis. National Student Assessments show that nearly half of Grade Five students cannot read Bengali at grade level, and around 70% cannot meet mathematics competencies. If increased education spending goes primarily toward infrastructure and technology initiatives rather than teacher development and foundational learning, the money will be spent without solving the problem. During the last two fiscal years, roughly 18-20% of the education budget went unspent. Bigger allocations do not automatically produce better outcomes.

Health spending has crossed 1% of GDP for the first time which is a milestone. But Bangladesh's Total Fertility Rate has risen back to 2.4, child mortality has increased, and the family planning programme is in genuine crisis. A budget that increases health spending in aggregate but lacks clear allocations for family planning, maternal health, and child nutrition is an accounting exercise, not an investment strategy.

Three deeper pathologies undermine all of this. The first is corruption. It is widely acknowledged but rarely confronted structurally. The second is implementation failure. Projects launched years ago remain incomplete. This chronic inability to finish what is started is a governance failure as serious as corruption, yet receives far less political attention. The third is waste, i.e., unnecessary institutions, redundant agencies, overlapping functions, and ineffective state enterprises that absorb public resources without producing public value. Reducing waste is not just good housekeeping. It is a fiscal strategy.

There is also a specific accountability failure worth naming. Until around 2015, the NBR published detailed statements specifying which sectors would contribute how much revenue and through what measures. That practice has been abandoned. NBR now receives an aggregate figure with no explanation of how it will be achieved. When a government taxes its citizens, it owes them that transparency.

Bangladesh does not lack ambition. What it consistently lacks is a binding implementation roadmap with quarterly outcome-based monitoring. Not expenditure tracking, but real indicators: Are children learning? Are maternal health services reaching communities? Are businesses actually receiving faster licensing? The question this budget must answer is not whether the numbers are bigger. It is whether the institutions exist to turn those numbers into real improvements in people's lives.

Fariha Afrin is a Research Executive at Power and Participation Research Centre (PPRC).