Zina Tasreen

He set off to save lives and livelihoods in his third budget as the finance minister and his second amid the global coronavirus pandemic, and along the way, went astray.

In the end, AHM Mustafa Kamal’s proposed budget for fiscal 2021-22 came across as not of its time: in the throes of a public health crisis that is unravelling some of the progress made over the last 50 years.

Bangladesh has been a development marvel, one which global commentators are acknowledging left, right and centre -- of late. And the cornerstone of the success has been its poverty reduction flight path and a spiralling trend of social and human indicators.

But the global coronavirus pandemic, which gripped Bangladesh in March last year like the rest of the world, has created a sea of poor -- and it is this populace that Kamal, who projects himself as a man of the people, seemed to have passed over in his intellectual callisthenics while drawing up the outlay for the incoming fiscal year.

About 20.5 percent of the population was already living in poverty and the pandemic raised the ratio to 30 percent, according to the World Bank.

Some 1.60 crore of new poor was created by the pandemic, according to an estimate of the Centre for Policy Dialogue in April, while another survey around the same time by the Power and Participation Research Centre and the Brac Institute of Governance and Development showed that 2.45 crore fell into poverty even before the second wave of the pandemic hit.