03/05/2026
Every year, Bangladesh celebrates the concrete symbols of its remarkable development story — the Padma Bridge, the expanding Dhaka skyline, the garment sector that clothed the world. Yet a quieter crisis, invisible to cameras and ribbon-cutting ceremonies, threatens to stall that progress at its foundation. Approximately one in four children under the age of five in Bangladesh is stunted, physically smaller than they should be due to chronic undernutrition in their earliest years. For economists, stunting is not merely a humanitarian statistic. It is a structural drag on the country's future productivity, built into the biology of its next generation of workers.
The Bangladesh Nationalist Party's proposed "Family Card" program, a monthly cash transfer of roughly Tk 2,000 to Tk 2,500 for five million of the country's most vulnerable households, has predictably attracted political scepticism. In Dhaka's partisan climate, such initiatives are too often filed under "populist handouts." That framing is not only uncharitable; it is analytically wrong. Evaluated through rigorous cost-benefit analysis, the Family Card is less a welfare expenditure and more a high-yield investment in human capital, one that compares favourably to nearly any infrastructure project on the national ledger.
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