Published: 12:28 AM, 13 June 2026
Proposed budget 'unimplementable': Jamaat
Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami has termed the proposed budget for the fiscal 2006-27 "overly debt-dependent, unimplementable and susceptible to looting.
At a formal reaction session at the party's central office in Dhaka's Moghbazar on Friday, Secretary General Mia Golam Parwar said the budget did not clearly explain how its BDT 6.29 trillion revenue target would be achieved and was unclear about how a BDT 2.36 trillion deficit would be financed.
Finance Minister Amir Khosru Mahmud Chowdhury placed the Tk 9.38 trillion budget for fiscal year 2026-27 in parliament on Thursday, with a revenue target of Tk 6.95 trillion and an overall deficit of Tk 2.37 trillion, equivalent to 3.5 percent of GDP.
Parwar said, "The budget's large deficit will be funded through bank loans. That will automatically shrink investment and employment."
"The tax structure and corruption-free administration needed to collect from the sources cited are not mentioned," he added.
He warned that plugging the deficit through bank borrowing would automatically crowd out private investment and drag down employment.
"If the government borrows from banks, the private sector cannot invest -- the impact on private business will follow naturally," he said.
Jamaat identified three "major obstacles" to implementation: rising costs in the power and energy sector, where gas, fuel and electricity prices have been raised multiple times in recent months; runaway inflation; and global and political-economic uncertainty.
Parwar described the 6.5 percent GDP growth target as highly overambitious and not fully consistent with economic realities, noting that the IMF and other international bodies had forecast Bangladesh's growth below 5 percent for the coming fiscal year.
On taxation, Parwar said doubling the minimum personal income-tax rate to 10 percent from 5 percent would place an extra burden on lower-middle-class and middle-class households already squeezed by inflation. VAT increases on petroleum, electricity and gas would bring further hardship, while customs-duty hikes on raw materials linked to the ready-made garment sector could threaten the export sector.
