Finance Minister AHM Mustafa Kamal has begun placing his Tk 6,78,064 crore draft budget for the fiscal year 2022-23 before the parliament, which is Tk 74,383 crore more compared to the last fiscal.
The minister started reading out the budget around 3:05pm on Thursday after the cabinet approved the draft budget at a meeting held at the cabinet room of the Jatiya Sangsad Bhaban in Dhaka.
The country’s 51st budget is being unveiled at a time when the economy is feeling the heat of global instability.
Kamal is placing the budget proposal for FY23 while facing pressure from a number of key issues — inflation, remittance, foreign trade deficit, and volatility in the forex exchange rate.
This is the 23rd budget of the Awami League government in five terms, and the size of the budget is 15 per cent of the country's gross domestic product or GDP.
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The proposed budget for the next FY will have a deficit of Tk 2,45,064 crore, an increase by Tk 30,383 crore when compared year-on-year. The deficit in FY22 was estimated at Tk 2,14,681 crore.
To cover the budget deficit in FY23, the government will collect Tk 1,46,335 crore from internal sources, Tk 95,458 crore from foreign loans, and Tk 3,271 crore as foreign aid.
Under the internal sources, the government will collect Tk 1,06,334 crore from banks, up by 39.08 per cent or Tk 76,452 crore estimated for the current fiscal year and Tk 35,000 crore from the sale of savings certificates, and Tk 5,001 crore from the sale of stamps, revenue stamps and others.
The projected inflation rate for FY23 is 5.6 per cent, an increase from 5.3 per cent estimated for the ongoing fiscal year. Data from the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) show that the country’s inflation rate stood at 6.29 per cent in April 2022.
In the new budget, Bangladesh has set a GDP (Gross Domestic Product) growth target of 7.5 per cent, which was 7.25 per cent in FY22.
The government has a revenue collection target of Tk 4,33,000 crore in FY23, which has gone up by Tk 44,000 crore compared to the outgoing fiscal year.
