Every year around budget season, Bangladesh’s finance ministry rolls out a familiar set of numbers more beneficiaries, slightly higher monthly stipends, a few new categories added to the list. It reads like progress. And in a narrow sense, it is. But look closer at how that progress is distributed, and a less comfortable pattern shows up: the country’s oldest citizens are being brought into the safety net faster and more generously than its disabled citizens are.
The Numbers Behind the Headlines
For fiscal year 2026-27, the government raised the number of Old Age Allowance beneficiaries by 100,000, taking the total to 6.2 million people. Nearly six million of them will now receive Tk 700 a month, up from Tk 650, while a smaller group aged above 90 gets Tk 1,000.
The Disability Allowance and Education Stipend Programme grew too from 3.45 million beneficiaries to roughly 3.6 million but the monthly rate for most recipients stayed flat at Tk 900. Only a small slice of about 18,100 people, likely those with the most severe disabilities, will see Tk 1,000.
Put side by side, the pattern is hard to miss. Old-age allowance: more people added, and a rate hike for almost all of them. Disability allowance: a smaller proportional increase in coverage, and the rate hike reaching only a fraction of recipients.
Why This Gap Matters
Bangladesh has roughly 1.65 percent of its population living with some form of disability, according to government survey data millions of people, many of whom face far higher costs of living than the general population: assistive devices, transport, medical care, and lost income from limited access to employment. An allowance that doesn’t grow with inflation isn’t just static it’s a real-terms cut every year prices rise.
Meanwhile, the number of elderly citizens covered keeps climbing steadily, year after year, alongside near-universal rate increases. That’s not a bad thing in itself an ageing population genuinely needs stronger support. The problem is what it reveals about priority-setting: when budget season comes around, old-age coverage gets treated as a default expansion, while disability coverage gets treated as one line item among many, competing for the same shrinking share of a safety-net budget that, as a whole, is still under 40 percent allocated to genuinely pro-poor programmes.
The Application Bottleneck
Numbers on paper are one problem. Getting the money into the right hands is another. Bangladesh’s Department of Social Services has repeatedly flagged irregularities in the beneficiary lists misuse tied to local political influence, people listed as disabled who don’t qualify, genuine claimants stuck in backlogs. For someone with a disability, navigating that bureaucracy proving eligibility, chasing local representatives for signatures, resubmitting paperwork is a far steeper climb than it is for an elderly applicant with a straightforward age-based test.
The result is a system where the stated expansion in beneficiary numbers doesn’t necessarily translate into disabled citizens actually receiving support on time, or at all.
What Would Closing the Gap Look Like
A few shifts would go a long way toward correcting the imbalance:
- Indexing the disability allowance to inflation, the same way the old-age rate has been nudged upward in recent budgets, rather than leaving it frozen for years at a stretch.
- Simplifying the verification process for disability claims, so genuine applicants aren’t filtered out by the same bureaucratic friction that lets fraudulent claims slip through.
- Publishing disaggregated data on how many eligible disabled citizens are still waiting versus how many are enrolled, so the gap between “beneficiaries added” and “people actually reached” is visible rather than buried in aggregate figures.
The Bottom Line
Bangladesh’s social safety net is expanding that much is real. But expansion isn’t the same as equity. As long as old-age coverage keeps getting bigger, faster, and better-funded than disability coverage, the country’s disabled citizens will keep falling further behind in a race they were never given the resources to run.