Farah Zahir
Editor, Oniket Research Group
Every June, Bangladesh’s national budget arrives with the choreography of a national event. Finance ministers present figures to parliament, television channels broadcast the speech live, newspapers prepare special supplements, and talk shows fill the evening schedules with economists and commentators reacting to the announcements. For approximately 48 hours, the budget dominates the national conversation. Then, as reliably as the monsoon, the coverage retreats and the document that will govern the allocation of trillions of taka disappears from public scrutiny until the following year. This cycle is not journalism. It is theatre, and its failure has serious consequences for democratic accountability in Bangladesh.
The Anatomy of a Coverage Failure
Bangladesh’s mainstream media approaches the national budget primarily as an event rather than a policy document. Coverage concentrates heavily on the headline size of the budget, the total allocation figures for flagship sectors such as education, health, and defence, and the immediate reactions of business federations and selected economists. This approach produces volumes of content that convey almost no useful information to most citizens who are most directly affected by the decisions being made.
What is systematically absent is impact analysis. A budget that allocates a larger nominal sum to health does not necessarily improve healthcare for the poor if implementation capacity is weak, if the additional funds are absorbed by administrative costs, or if the previous year’s allocation was itself only partially spent. Bangladesh’s own Citizens Budget, a simplified version of the budget designed for public understanding, scored only 33 out of 100 in the 2023 Open Budget Survey. The country’s overall transparency score of 37 falls well below the threshold of 61 that the survey identifies as sufficient for informed public debate. Bangladesh does not produce a mid-year budget review and keeps its year-end accounts and audit reports for internal use only. Media organisations that simply relay what the government presents are therefore relaying an incomplete picture and, in the process, normalising that incompleteness.
From a broader development perspective, this gap directly undermines SDG 16, which calls for effective, accountable and transparent institutions. Without sustained media scrutiny, budget transparency remains procedural rather than substantive, limiting citizens’ access to justice in economic governance and weakening institutional accountability.
The structural reasons for this failure are well documented. Most major media outlets in Bangladesh are owned by business interests with deep political and commercial ties to the state. An editorial culture shaped by ownership proximity to government renders genuinely critical budget analysis professionally hazardous. Bangladesh ranked 165th out of 180 countries in the Reporters Without Borders press freedom index, and the long shadow of restrictive legislation has reinforced a tendency toward deference rather than scrutiny. When the people who own media companies also benefit from budget decisions on tariffs, subsidies, and public contracts, the incentive to interrogate those decisions is structurally suppressed.
What Responsible Budget Reporting Demands
The standard that Bangladesh’s media falls short of is not an unreasonable one. It is the standard that journalism in functioning democracies applies to public finance as a matter of routine. Budget reporting should begin before budget day. Pre-budget coverage ought to examine what the previous year’s allocations were delivered, drawing on implementation data, audit findings, and citizen testimony. If the education budget was increased in the previous cycle, journalists should arrive at the new announcement armed with evidence of whether school enrolment improved, whether teachers were paid on time, and whether infrastructure was built. This is the basic discipline of accountability journalism.
Coverage on budget day itself should move beyond the ceremonial. Reporters should be equipped to ask not merely how much was allocated to a sector, but who specifically benefits, who bears the tax burden, and what assumptions underpin the revenue projections. Bangladesh’s fiscal deficit and rising debt servicing obligations deserve sustained, expert treatment rather than passing mention. The distributional consequences of indirect taxes, particularly for low-income households who spend proportionally more of their earnings on taxed goods, represent a story of genuine public importance that rarely surfaces in budget coverage.
This is also where SDG 8 becomes central. A budget is not only a fiscal statement but also a blueprint for inclusive economic growth, productive employment, and decent work. Yet media coverage rarely explains how allocations translate into jobs, wages, or productivity shifts in the real economy.
For example, budget decisions directly influence areas such as:
- Employment generation programmes, where allocations determine the scale of job creation in both rural and urban sectors
- Small and medium enterprise financing, which shapes entrepreneurship and informal sector transition into formal work
- Industrial incentives and export support, which affect wage growth and manufacturing employment
- Skill development and technical education, which determines workforce readiness for modern industries
- Social protection schemes, which stabilize vulnerable workers during inflation or economic shocks
Without explaining these linkages, budget numbers remain abstract rather than developmental.
Most critically, budget journalism must not end on the day of the announcement. Monthly and quarterly tracking of actual revenue collection against targets, expenditure against allocations, and progress on capital projects is the work through which a document of intentions becomes a record of performance. This is the journalism that governments find most inconvenient and that citizens most need. Bangladesh’s media has the platforms, the reach, and the technical capacity to deliver it. What has been lacking is the institutional will and the editorial independence to do so consistently and without fear of consequence.
Towards a New Institutional Role for Media
At this stage of democratic and economic development, Bangladesh’s media sector can evolve beyond event-based reporting into a structured public accountability institution. One constructive pathway is the creation of dedicated Budget Units within media organisations. These units could combine economic journalism, data analysis, and policy expertise to continuously track fiscal planning and execution throughout the year.
Such units could function as a bridge between government and citizens, not as adversaries but as informed interpreters of fiscal reality. By translating complex budget documents into accessible public understanding, they would strengthen both transparency and trust. In this model, media does not replace government institutions but complements them by ensuring that policy decisions are continuously evaluated in public space.
This approach aligns directly with SDG 16, reinforcing strong institutions through informed public participation, and with SDG 8, by helping citizens understand how economic policy affects employment, growth, and opportunity. A budget that no one scrutinises is a budget that no one governs. But a budget that is consistently analysed, explained, and tracked becomes a shared national document rather than a once-a-year performance.
Bangladesh deserves better than an annual ceremony dressed up as journalism. It deserves a media ecosystem that treats the national budget not as an event, but as a living contract between the state and its citizens, shaping both economic opportunity and institutional accountability throughout the year.
