Bangladesh has historically viewed social protection as a process of increasing spending, reach, and the number of programmes. This is not the wrong approach. However, this line of thinking has created a social protection network that is huge and chaotic: 95 different programmes implemented through at least 39 ministries, budgeting Tk 1,16,731 crore for fiscal year 2025-26, or 14.78 percent percent of the country’s annual budget. The problem isn’t the money; it’s where the money ends up.
The World Bank's Bangladesh Poverty and Equity Assessment 2025 revealed that, in 2022, 35 percent of the richest received benefits, whereas half of the poorest people did not. The subsidies provided for electricity, fuel, and fertiliser—tools which supposedly target poor people—are being taken advantage of by richer sections. The richest urban households accounted for almost half of the total electricity subsidy expenditure. This is not just wastage, but also signals a deliberate misuse of the system.
The macroeconomic backdrop only exacerbates the problem. Inflation rose faster than wages in the last 50 months up to March 2026, with an average inflation rate of 9.73 percent against a wage growth rate of 7.74 percent in FY2024, as per data released by the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics. Four years of shrinking real incomes imply that the poor not only lack resources but are actually getting poorer.
The safety net system in Bangladesh has never been intentionally designed; rather, it grew organically. The Trading Corporation of Bangladesh’s (TCB) Family Card, the Ministry of Agriculture’s Farmers Card, the proposed LPG card schemes, pension for the elderly, scholarships for education—all were introduced by different ministries, using their own databases and targeting mechanisms. No one organisation has an overview of the entire system and there is no central database that identifies who is getting which form of assistance from which ministry or department.
When one crore handwritten Family Cards were verified with NIDs, a single exercise in duplicate removal resulted in the cancellation of 43 lakh cards. For years, funds channelled into already-serviced households. The same pattern is emerging from the ongoing Family Card pilot project. Out of 35,844 beneficiaries verified by the finance ministry, 6,487 (or, 18.1 percent) were ineligible under the very criteria laid down by the programme These included government employees, pensioners, savings certificate holders, vehicle owners, 5,021 TCB cardholders, beneficiaries of the Vulnerable Women Benefit, Food-Friendly Programme beneficiaries, and hundreds from other safety net programmes. All instances of duplication happen because there is no comprehensive system that can tell, at the moment of enrolment, what benefits a family or individual already enjoys. In addition, an estimated 22-25 percent of the poor remain unserviced by any programme.
One measure that could cut through this tangle is the introduction of a unified social identification card. That is, a single national identity platform, integrated with one dynamic social registry, from which all welfare benefits are disbursed. The family registers itself only once, and its income, size, and vulnerability status are recorded centrally and constantly updated. Regardless of whether the benefit is a direct cash payment, subsidised cooking gas, subsidised seeds and fertilisers, or subsidised food—the eligibility criteria would be checked against one verified record. Claiming several benefits would become technically impossible, exclusion would be more visible and easier to correct and, during crises, the government would be able to connect to the most affected families within days, not months.
India's Aadhaar-linked Direct Benefit Transfer system generated cumulative savings of 3.48 lakh crore Indian rupees over a decade, cutting leakage from 40-50 percent to under five percent. Brazil's Cadastro Único supports 27 federal programmes for 42 million families through one registry. Estonia's Once-Only Principle prohibits agencies from asking citizens for data the state already holds; Singapore's Singpass delivers over 2,700 services through one digital identity. These are working systems built by governments that decided fragmentation was too costly to sustain.
Bangladesh has the foundations. The Family Card pilot, implemented in March 2026 in 14 upazilas, includes 40,000 families and costs Tk 2,500 per month per family, all based on the Dynamic Social Registry that seeks to combine various programmes into one. The government is aiming to introduce a “Universal Social ID Card” for every individual by 2030. However, as the finance ministry audit report had already revealed, grandiose plans without an integrated monitoring framework will yield the same leakage the programme was meant to seal. Analysts warn the Proxy Means Test could misclassify households—particularly the urban working poor who do not appear destitute on paper but remain one illness away from destitution. Good intentions without robust infrastructure produce familiar failures.
There are three challenges to manage. First, the centralised register will need encryption, independent oversight, and data protection legislation. Second, digital inclusion is a challenge that will require setting up digital hubs at the union level, as well as backup options for elderly people, disabled people, and those in poorly connected areas. Finally, fragmentation will be maintained because it has served many purposes, including discretionary powers for local administrators and control by ministers of different databases. Consolidation requires political will that proves itself not in launch ceremonies, but in the hard interoperability work that follows.
The Family Card, Farmers Card, and proposed LPG Card are attempts to solve the same problem with a separate instrument. Bangladesh does not need more cards. It needs one system behind all of them. The heap of broken images has been accumulating long enough. It is time to make something whole.
Md Rakibul Hasan works with Bangladesh Small and Cottage Industries Corporation (BSCIC). He can be reached at [email protected].
Views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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