ARUN DEVNATH

A record budget. The fallout of a distant war. A banking crisis. An imminent reckoning with the IMF. These are the notes Amir Khosru Mahmud Chowdhury must play, all at once, in his first budget as finance minister -- a job he has held for less than four months.

Every June, Bangladesh presents a budget. The outlay almost always gets bigger, the deficit rarely closes, and the annual ritual goes on. Arithmetically, this June is no different. But politically, it feels different. For the first time in 20 years, it is the BNP’s number to announce, the BNP’s deficit to explain, and the BNP’s promise to keep. It is a burden, an opportunity, and quite likely, a bit of both.

Prime Minister Tarique Rahman, exiled in London for 17 years, who had watched the economy from a distance, now sits at the centre of it, looking at the big number -- a budget of Tk 9.38 lakh crore for the fiscal year beginning July 1. This is a 19 percent increase over this year’s revised outlay and, in nominal terms, roughly 13 times larger than BNP’s last budget two decades ago.

It is also, by most reasonable assessments, unaffordable.

Welcome to Bangladesh’s budget season.

The country that built one of Asia’s great growth stories did so by collecting taxes at roughly 7 percent of GDP -- less than India, less than Vietnam, and less than almost any comparable economy. The global average for developing countries sits around 15 percent. Bangladesh, with an economy of half a trillion dollars,

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