On a low-lying island in Patuakhali, 32-year-old Tanjila Begum’s husband works irregularly as a day labourer in nearby watermelon fields, where seasonal tidal surges often destroy crops and wipe out daily earnings.
“We are a landless family. My husband works as a day labourer, and I also work in people’s homes. But work is not always available, so we find it difficult to make ends meet,” said Tanjila.
Now she receives Tk 2,500 every month directly into her digital account and sets aside Tk 500 as a reserve for periods when bad weather prevents outdoor work, using the rest to buy basic food and educational supplies for her young son.
Tanjila is one of 808 initial recipients in a pilot project in Galachipa upazila under the government’s nationwide Family Card programme.
“Most people in this coastal area live in poverty. They mainly depend on fishing and agriculture, particularly watermelon farming, for their livelihoods,” said Abujar Md Ijajul Haq, upazila nirbahi officer of Galachhipa.
Building on experience from these remote and marginal communities, the government is now preparing to expand the mechanism nationwide, in what officials describe as the country’s most comprehensive overhaul of its social welfare system in decades.
The Family Card programme seeks to bring Bangladesh’s historically fragmented welfare schemes, often plagued by administrative leakages and political patronage, under a single digital safety net.
High-level priority for the scheme was reinforced at a recent cabinet committee meeting chaired by Finance Minister Amir Khosru Mahmud Chowdhury, where senior officials reviewed its progress.
For nationwide surveys, data collection and administrative costs,the programme has a Tk 2,400 crore commitment, with Tk 900 crore coming from the World Bank’s Social Protection for Inclusion, Resilience, Innovation and Transformation programme, and Tk 1,500 crore from the government.
The programme will formally be launched on August 16 in Kishoreganj and then gradually expanded to every upazila and union by late October, depending on the success and efficiency of the survey.
Before the inauguration by Prime Minister Tarique Rahman, new software and an app developed from the survey database will undergo a trial run among families in Ward 8 of Latifabad Union in Kishoreganj.
The government plans to make the Family Card the cornerstone of its social protection system, expanding its coverage over the coming years.
According to a presentation at the cabinet committee meeting, the programme will cover 41 lakh families in 2026-27 fiscal year, 81 lakh in 2027-28 and 1.21 crore in 2028-29, before reaching its target of 1.61 crore households by 2029-30.
Under the restructured welfare system, payments will be made exclusively in the name of the eldest female member of each eligible household.
Officials say the arrangement is intended to strengthen women’s decision-making power within families and encourage spending on household nutrition.
To prevent duplicate registrations across government agencies, technical teams at the ICT Division are linking the National Identification numbers and birth registration records of family members to create a unified digital family profile.
Payments will be made through a dual-interface smart chip card integrated with TakaPay, Bangladesh’s national retail payment infrastructure.
Beneficiaries will be able to withdraw the money through commercial bank terminals and ATMs nationwide.
Distribution will be handled through 3,072 designated branches of three state-owned banks -- Sonali Bank, Bangladesh Krishi Bank and Janata Bank.
Eligibility will be determined using a Proxy Means Test scoring model based on national household income and expenditure survey data collected by the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics.
The system will classify households into five income tiers and automatically enrol those in the bottom three.
A household will be deemed ineligible if any member receives a government pension, holds a regular government or state-affiliated job, pays income tax, has savings certificates worth more than Tk 5 lakh, owns a registered four-wheeler, or possesses more than half an acre of arable or commercial land.
For the baseline field survey, the administration is deploying 66,815 enumerators under the supervision of 6,681 field supervisors. Interest in the jobs has been high, with 4,69,103 applications submitted for enumerator positions through 583 social welfare offices nationwide.
Enumerators will receive Tk 165 for each household surveyed, while supervisors will be paid Tk 30 for each entry.
In Galachipa, scrutiny of applications is underway and 103 enumerators will be appointed, said an official of the upazila administration.
Unlike conventional census projects conducted solely by the BBS, the Family Card survey involves local administration and social service officials at every level.
Divisional commissioners, district administrators and UNOs have been tasked with overseeing field activities, while officials of the Department of Social Services have been appointed coordinators at divisional, district and unit levels.
“Field officers are treating the project with the utmost urgency under strict instructions issued to union-level authorities,” said Mohammad Shaheed Hossain Chowdhury, deputy commissioner of Patuakhali.
Field staff will collect information through a paperless mobile system that requires live location tagging, photographs documenting living conditions and digital signatures, said Abdur Rashhid Khan, deputy director of the Patuakhali Social Services Department.
The collected data will be screened by AI-powered auditing software to flag discrepancies between reported income and living conditions. Supervisory teams will then recheck 5-10 percent of surveyed households to verify the information.
The survey aims to collect data on 4.45 crore families.
Under the pilot launched in March, data on 1,09,679 families were collected from selected areas across the country.
Nearly 77,000 were initially found eligible, but around 6,000 were later excluded after officials found pensioners, government employees or other disqualifying criteria among the family members.
In effect, the pilot successfully covered about 92 percent of the selected families.
For Tanjila and many other women of coastal Char Biswas union, the monthly payment has become a small but dependable cushion against the uncertainty of life in a climate-vulnerable community.
“The Family Card support is a great source of security for poor families like ours. We use the money to meet urgent household needs and save Tk 500 every month for the future, especially for times when storms or floods prevent us from earning.
“Our son is in primary school. We also save some money for him so that we can meet the costs of his education,” she said.
