In the early 1970s, Bangladesh was considered overpopulated due to the country’s limited land area and resources; and the government declared rapid population growth as a national problem in the country in 1976. To address this, a preliminary population policy outline was prepared in 1976. The policy was formulated and approved in 2004, and was later updated in 2012.
A National Population Council (NPC) was constituted in 1975 as the highest-level body, with the President of Bangladesh as chairperson and concerned ministers as members, to guide and give advice related to population planning and execution of policies. However, as per a report published in The Daily Star recently, the NPC has not met for the last 16 years. This shows that population planning and policy implementation has not received due attention during the last decade and a half. As we will explore below, the impact of this gap is visible in population data from the last few years.
In the First Five-Year Plan (1973-1978), the country’s population growth rate was estimated at about 3 percent. Accordingly, the policy focus was to control population growth through family planning to reduce family size and ensure sound maternal and child health. Both explicit measures (such as making contraceptives widely available) and implicit measures (such as promoting women’s education) were included in the policy.
An area-based approach was adopted in the Bangladesh Population Policy 2012 to develop localised plans and undertake targeted interventions to achieve better outcomes. Over a decade later, the 2025 population policy aimed at the utilisation of the demographic dividend together with achievement of lower fertility rate. The demographic dividend is an opportunity as a higher share of working-age population (15-64 years) exists. Ideally, younger people should be educated and their skills developed so they can be employed in sectors which need them. The 2025 policy also recommended regional planning, service delivery, capacity building, development, and job creation.
The adoption of a decentralised approach and other crucial policy decisions require the highest level of attention and constant monitoring of performance in the population sector. In this case, the role of the NPC, established in 1975, was also deemed crucial in the 2012 and 2025 population policies.
Bangladesh’s population growth rate decreased from around 3 percent in 1976 to 1.22 percent in 2022. The use of contraceptive methods increased substantially from only 8 percent in the mid-1970s to a peak of 64 percent in 2024. But, as per the latest Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS) data, this dropped significantly to 58.2 percent in 2025.
The success of the family planning efforts, however, seems to have stalled. According to MICS data over the years, although the Total Fertility Rate (TFR) remained at 2.3 between 2012 and 2019 (down from 6.3 births per woman in 1975), it increased to 2.4 in the latest MICS. Meanwhile, Bangladesh’s total population is expected to rise to 22.3 crore by 2061, according to the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics’ projections. After this point, the total number of people is projected to decline. But for this to happen, the TFR has to fall to 2.1 to reach a replacement-level population, which may take more than three decades to attain.
The success of fertility decline in Bangladesh is often attributed to the increase in contraceptive use. Besides this, other contributing factors are believed to include improvement in education access (especially girl’s education), access to adolescent health, increase in women’s employment opportunities, and changes in people’s view of a smaller family size.
Due to high correlation between the family size and poverty is apparent as per different studies, policymakers still believe that effective family planning measures should continue to be one of the cornerstones of our population policy until a replacement level fertility rate is achieved. This entails—besides broad policy directives issued at the national level—the adoption of a decentralised approach that includes district-level analysis of population, followed by the introduction of district-level strategies with a focus on hard-to-reach and low-performing areas.
Additionally, to enhance population management (rather than control), access to basic healthcare and family planning, social safety net, and educational and employment opportunities should be deliberately prioritised for low-performing districts. The MICS 2025 report, for instance, shows that while Rangpur leads with 67 percent in the category of married women using any contraceptive method, Chattogram has a much lower rate of 48 percent in terms of the same.
Therefore, by ensuring data delves further to the district level, it will be possible to focus on specific low-performing districts and deploy programmes to improve their performance. Just like interventions such as the Essential Programme on Immunization (EPI), which undertakes district-level strategy and has had a successful track record in performance over many years, population planning should also be rooted in the district level, with interventions monitored for higher efficacy. Planning and managing population at the national level alone will not deliver the desired results. Communities living along Bangladesh’s coastal belts, hill regions, urban slums, and river erosion-prone areas face specific challenges and therefore need special attention and priority-based service delivery. Disaggregated data should be generated for these areas so that this can be ensured for the targeted population.
Dr Nawshad Ahmed a retired UN official, is an economist and urban planner. He can be reached at: [email protected].
Views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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