After design and targeting, we reach the central structural issue: What does the Family Card mean for Bangladesh's national budget? Good intentions do not override arithmetic. They operate within it.
The baseline arithmetic is sobering. A universal programme at Tk 2,500 per month for 40 million households implies an annual cost of roughly Tk 1.2 trillion — close to 2 percent of GDP and a significant share of the national budget.
This article breaks down the fiscal cost under different scenarios — universal, targeted, and phased — and compares it to existing social protection spending in Bangladesh. It asks: what programmes would the Family Card replace, and what would it complement?
The analysis shows that simply adding the Family Card on top of existing schemes would be fiscally unsustainable. Meaningful reform requires consolidation — identifying which existing programmes are redundant, ineffective, or overlapping with the Family Card's objectives.
The article argues that the fiscal question is not merely about affordability but about value: every taka spent on the Family Card is a taka not spent on something else. Trade-offs are inevitable, and they should be made deliberately, not by default.